Sustaining Television News Archives

This paper reports on the findings of a sustainability study of television news archives conducted in 2018. After reviewing the history of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, it discusses the legal, economic, and technical issues that archivists need to consider when preserving television news, making their collections accessible to the public, and enabling researchers to explore their holdings through emerging technologies like data and text mining. The second half of the paper considers how nonprofit television news archives might collaborate more closely, arguing that sharing and aggregating standardized metadata would constitute a promising step toward that goal, and concludes that sustaining nonprofit television news archiving over the long term requires acknowledging the diversity of publics these archives serve as well as their distinctive financial models.