NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Treasured television news specials broadcast from 1968 to 2003 will become more accessible to the public, thanks to the Vanderbilt Television News Archive receiving new funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The Vanderbilt Television News Archive, which began taping news programs in 1968, has been awarded a two-year grant of $279,507 to digitize and catalogue its collection of news specials broadcast outside of the regular evening newscasts.
“The 1973 Watergate hearings, presidential news conferences, political conventions and other ‘gems’ of the archive’s collection will be converted from tape to digital format,” said Marshall Breeding, director for innovative technologies and research at the Vanderbilt University Library. “This grant will cover specials starting with the Democratic and Republican national conventions in 1968 until June of 2003, when we began recording everything digitally. The digital format allows us to work more efficiently and to offer more options for accessing the material.”
John Lynch, director of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, said that an important part of the project is creating abstracts that describe the content of the special programs. “Most of the specials are not described in any detail right now,” he said. “The public has to presume that we have these programs and then request them. Special programs, including those surrounding the 9/11 attacks and the war in Iraq will become readily available through the archive’s search engine.”
In addition, transcripts of the Watergate hearings will be digitized and linked to the televised hearings. “The archive has hundreds of hours of Watergate hearings both in the Senate and the House,” Lynch said. “However, unless you know what happened each day, you wouldn’t know when particular testimony took place.”
Lynch uses the example of Sen. Howard Baker’s memorable question during the Watergate hearings, “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” Lynch said that by linking the transcripts to the video, one could do a quick search for when Baker said it and then request the video to watch it.
“The combination of having the televised hearings and text of the transcripts should make us the premiere site on the Web for information about the Watergate hearings,” Breeding said. “This is going to be powerful having the text and video together.” Lynch said that they hope to expand eventually the pairing of transcripts with video to other historic hearings, such as Iran-Contra, and presidential speeches.
The archive will be able to distribute the digitized video in streaming format to specific groups that have agreements in place to view specific parts of the collection. For example, the archive has an agreement with CNN that allows it to stream content from the CNN part of the collection to educational subscribers. The archive began recording CNN news and special programs in November 1988.
The general public will be able to watch the streaming video at the Jean and Alexander Heard Library or in the Television News Archive, located at 704 Baker Building. The archive will also continue to provide loaned videotapes of programs by mail for a fee. In the coming months, Lynch plans to offer the material on video disc. The archive just completed a two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize the collection of network evening newscasts.
For more information about the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, click on http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu.
Media contact: Ann Marie Deer Owens, 615-322-NEWS
annmarie.owens@vanderbilt.edu