Digital Preservation | Clifford B. Anderson

Preservation and Archiving of Digital Media

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Vanderbilt Archive Founded to Hold Media Accountable Turns 50

Mon, 30 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Vanderbilt Television News Archive, founded in 1968 as a three-month ’experiment’ to explore possible bias in network newscasts, will mark its 50th year of continuous operation on August 5th.

Vanderbilt’s archive—open to everyone in the world—was the very first archive to record and preserve evening newscasts and special programs broadcast by ABC, CBS and NBC. The commercials that run during the newscasts are also preserved. In 1995, the archive began capturing a portion of daily news reports from CNN and added an hour of Fox News in 2004.

The archive was the brainchild of the late Paul Simpson, a Vanderbilt Law School alumnus who was upset over what he perceived as liberal bias in the big three networks’ reporting. He was dismayed to learn that the networks did not save their own tapes when he wanted to review a network interview with LSD-proponent Timothy Leary.

The Vanderbilt Library agreed to partner with Simpson to begin recording the evening newscasts on one-inch reel-to-reel tape. Simpson and then-director Frank Grisham began their taping with the opening of the 1968 Republican Convention.

‘Grisham was an entrepreneurial-type librarian for what was very much a do-it-yourself operation at the beginning,’ said Clifford B. Anderson, associate university librarian for research and learning. ‘Fast forward 50 years and the news programs are being preserved on specialized servers maintained by the university’s high-performance computer center.’

Sustaining Television News for the Next Generation

Wed, 27 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded funding to Vanderbilt University for a workshop and planning effort to examine and address the technical, legal and economic challenges of preserving broadcast television news in the 21st century.

The project, “Sustaining Television News Preservation for the Next Generation,” will bring together archivists, librarians and television news professionals for a two-day workshop at the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries March 8-9, 2018. Participants will develop new strategies for sustaining library-based broadcast preservation.

Clifford B. Anderson, associate university librarian for research and learning at Vanderbilt University, and Bernard Reilly, president of the Center for Research Libraries, are the principal investigators. The planning team also includes Sharon Farb of UCLA’s Broadcast NewsScape and representatives from the Library of Congress.”