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Michael C. Lang. Senior Vice President, Business Afrairs. ABC Broadcast Operations & Engineering. 47 West 66th Street. New York, New York 10023 ...
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Study of the Current State of American Television & Video Preservation
by The 1,ibrary of Congress
Sz~hmr..rronhy ARC BROADCAST OPERATIONS & ENGINEERING (CAPITAL CITIESIABC, INC.)
Michael C. Lang. Senior Vice President, Business Afrairs ABC Broadcast Operations & Engineering 47 West 66th Street New York, New York 10023
In June, 1993, Robert Iger, who was then President of the ARC Television Network Group and is today President of Capital CitiesiABC, gave his enthusiastic support to a pro-ject proposed by Preston Dav~s,President of ARC Broadcast Operations & Engineering, to ensure that the network's vast archive of owned video material would be presewed. In the over 2 1i2 years since then, representatives from ABC News, Sports, Entertainment and Broadcast Operations & Engineering have worked together to build the
Balkanized into different collections, located in different places, operated by different divisions or departments, catalogued in different ways and to different standards, and stored with different levels of care Even worse, we soon reallzed that some unknown percentage of this material was in danger of being lost. For example, during preparation for a retrospective Barbara Walters special, a number of field tapes were retrievcd from storage for viewing as possible source material. Damage caused by adhesives once used in the assembly of rcels was discovered on one important interview tape, other 2" and even newer I " reels were found to be dirty,
fresh beta copy is returned to the shelves of the working library from which it was
appropriate facility, either on or off the Company's premises, where it can quietly reside until another working copy is required. During the initial planning process, all parties had agreed that the deteriorating copy -- once it had been dubbed afresh -- could be discarded Even a mildly skeptical observer, however, might easily conclude that only the intense 5-. pressure of overflowing shelves^ will^ force t h ~ scleansing deaccession to occur. h c (^) Although D2 is our initial choice of format for long-term archival storage, it almost ,- certainly won't be our last. For the moment, at least, considering the massive quantity of material with which we will have to deal, it meets the two most pressing criteria: it is
econocnically competitive with tape, the random access capability of the disk format, plus the likelihood of a very extended shelf life, would certainly make i t an attractive successor format. Unfortunately, with a perpetual archiving process that will involve changes in the selected storage medium, one of our most troublesome concerns is how to ensure that we continue to possess and maintain the technical equipment required to permit the playback of electronically stored images. (^) - 4 -
Unlike printed paper, which presents itself directly to the human eye, analog and digital signals are incomprehensible until played back through an electronic mediating device that converts them into recognizable pictures and sound. As formats evolve, the
the probable unavailability of the equipment (including spare parts) needed to play the stuff back. Like Proteus, formats will continue to change. Rut great caution should be exercised before scrapping one established archival storage medium and substituting another. Considering the volume of material with which we must deal, the possibility of reconverting all previously archived material to each successor medium to maintain a neat consistency, and eliminate the need for more than one sort of playback device, will almost surely be impractical and uneconomic For entities like ARC with several hundred thousand hours of material on hand, the desire to achieve preservation at a reasonable cost is obvious. We must, therefore. consider the possible use of compression. Compression technology would permit a radical reduction in the amount of both the storage medium required and the space in which to house it. The issue ofwhether it is archivally responsible to compress video material is, we understand, a highly charged one. Some opponents of compression pronounce it anathema, maintaining that to use it is to needlessly throw away a percentage of the material which we are committed to save.
problems, both technical and conceptual, we each encounter individually can be discussed, and perhaps even solved, together.
