PTV Digital Archive

The January NDIIPP partners meeting was at UC San Diego, hosted in part by the San Diego Super Computer Center (SDSC). LC has been hosting these meetings twice a year now for all the NDIIPP projects plus fellow travellers, and these gatherings have been less about us talking about our projects and more about LC informing us about their activities and plans.  They are also important opportunities for us to talk among ourselves, especially now that we are all well along into our third project year.

The PTV Digital Archive delegation, included Nan Rubin and Mike Boeglin from Thirteen, Leah Weisse from WGBH; from NYU Howard Besser, Unni Pillai and Brian Hoffman; Glenn Clatworthy, Julie Fenderson and Irene Taylor from PBS, and Jeff Ubois.

The meeting focused on strengthening the ties between projects by scheduling a range of break-out sessions where groups could discuss issues in depth and exchange resources. There was a special emphasis on technical issues, and which our team found very helpful. There were also useful breakout sessions on economic issues and legal issues, and on metadata. A few of us presented at the plenaries or breakouts, including Thomas and Leah, in addition to Nan.

Being in San Diego also offered an opportunity for our folks to meet with the staff at SDSC about NYU’s plans to use SDSC’s SRB (storage resource broker) service as part of the management scheme for repository operations.  (We also enjoyed a nice dinner with the fishes at the Scripps Aquarium.)

NDIIPP Strategic Outcomes
A meeting of the PI’s was scheduled at the same time, and we met for a half-day before the general partners meeting began, and again for a few hours after the closing plenary. The discussions revolved around the Strategic Outcomes that LC wants to present:
* National Digital Collection
* National Digital Content Stewardship Network
* Technical Infrastructure for the Network
* Digital Preservation Sustainability
* Public Policy for Digital Preservation

Based on these goals, LC is asking all the NDIIPP projects to focus on these collaborative efforts as well as our individual activities.  We don’t see any difficulties with these, because they fit pretty nicely into our own plans, too.

LC also produced an animation to introduce the World Digital Archives. It’s a large file, but as good as anything out of Pixar. Three minutes to show the digital archives at your fingertips! 

For those who want to know more about the progress with the deveopment of PBCore:

As many of you are aware, a metadata dictionary used to describe the intellectual content, rights, and formats of public broadcasting media has been developed and made available for your use.

It is called PBCore, or Public Broadcasting Core of Metadata Descriptions (http://www.pbcore.org ). PBCore is being used in public radio and television and beyond to describe, publish and share content, and to allow others to find your content.

Sounds like a great idea, right? But what, exactly, is a metadata dictionary? For that matter, um… what *is* PBCore?

Learn the answers to these and other questions at a one-hour on-line presentation hosted by the PBCore Project at WGBH.

“PBCore 101: Introduction to PBCore” will be held on Wednesday, January 31, at 2:00pm Eastern time, and repeated on Thursday, February 1, at 2:00pm Eastern time. both sessions will be conducted via WebEx, and there is no charge to attend. All you need is a phone, a Web browser and an Internet connection.

If you would like to participate in these training presentations, please go to http://pbcore.webex.com , click on the “Upcoming” tab and register for the session you want to attend. Note that you will be prompted to install the WebEx Java applet once you have completed the registration form. You may install the applet at any time prior to the session.

Please contact Geoff Freed at g e o f f _ f r e e d @ w g b h . o r g if you have questions about registration or the presentation itself.

“Introduction to PBCore” is the first presentation in a series being developed by the PBCore Project. Upcoming sessions will focus on resources being developed to support your use of PBCore, including the PBCore XML schema and the implementation of PBCore through cataloging
tools.

The PBCore Project is administered by the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH (NCAM). Initial PBCore development, advocacy and training is funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

As we fast approach the deadline for the FCC-mandated transition to replace analog television broadcasting with digital service, I thought a little refresher from 10 years ago might be useful —  

Industries Agree on U.S. Standards for TV of the Future
?[From the  New York Times 11/26/1996, AUTHOR: Mark Landler] ??”Ending years of industry squabbling, the broadcasting, consumer electronics and computer industries announced an agreement on a technical standard for the next generation of television. The accord opened the door for the crystal-clear pictures and expanded services promised by digital television. It also set up a titanic battle for the nation’s living rooms between computer companies and television set manufacturers, both of which want to build the digital device that will display these images. Representatives of the industries worked out the deal in marathon talks over several weeks after Federal Communications Commissioner Susan Ness urged them to resolve their disputes so the Commission could ratify a standard for digital television by the end of the year.”

?And so, digital television (DTV) conversion continues apace.  Congress has set Feb. 17, 2009 as the deadline for turning off analog television signals and voilá!  we‘ll all be watching our favorite public television programs in glorious digital quality, and even High Definition (whenever available)…

Of course, even if all the existing television stations in the U.S. are able to replace their analog equipment with shiny, new digital transmission facilities on time, the transition will probably not be so smooth for us as viewers.  

At the instant that the analog signals are turned off, all of us will need digital receivers of some sort, because our existing analog tee vee sets won’t work any more. This is a particular issue for that slice of the public that only watches over-the-air broadcasting, because their analog sets will immediately go dark.  Replacing them could be costly, especially for folks with more than one television in their homes, because all of them will need to be replaced. 

For those of us who receive our television signals from indirect sources like cable or satellite, (in some markets, this might be as high as 80% of viewership)  it won’t be such a shock.  If we aren’t already getting digitals signals through our set-top box, we will be soon, because these providers are well along in rolling out digital converters to their subscribers.  Even so, there are going to be costs for us, too. Right now, there isn’t much public consciousness about this transition to DTV, and even with a mandate from the FCC that new television sets must become digital-broadcast ready, it is too soon to tell how this might play out at Best Buy or Circuit City. 

And while stations are busy plugging in expensive new gear, the rapid rise of on-demand viewing, time-shifting video recorders, and video on-line have deeply ‘eroded’ traditional television viewing.  Because this larger digital environment will continue to reshape our viewing habits, some people inside public television are arguing that over-the-air television as we know it is already dead.  Instead, they say, we should be turning to these more flexible and viewer-controlled outlets. 

Regardless, the genie of digital television – in all its existing and future forms —  is out of the bottle, and won’t be stuffed back in.  Which makes our efforts at preserving the programming, no matter how people watch it, all the more critical.  ?        

The Association of Moving Image Archivists met in Anchorage earlier this month, and a growing awareness of the importance of preserving television, as well as video on the Internet, was a major point of discussion among many attendees.

One of the more entertaining sessions was a special evening, curated by Jeff Martin, marking the the 50th anniversary of the invention of video tape.  The screening highlighed a wide selection of historical moments captured on 2″ tape –including a ‘ribbon cutting’ ceremony with President Eisenhower, marking NBC’s switch from black-and-white to color; scenes from national variety programs; a local weather report featuring a live shot of a tornado; a very down-home talent program; and extraordinary news footage capturing the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald.

It was a stark reminder of how immediate television can be and how much of it is now at risk, not only current digital materials, but decades of analog tapes that should be properly recognized and conserved.

A panel from the Library of Congress presented an inspiring overview of the progress made at the National Audio Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC) in Culpeper, Virginia.

Other sessions on Re-mastering Your Old Domain: The Future of Yesterday’s TV, Providing Web Accessible Moving Images for Education, Cataloguing Video for Access and Preservation highlighted the shift towards digital and online video.

In the year ahead, AMIA’s News, Documentary, and Television Interest Group will be developing guidelines for archives to use in negotiating with commercial companies that  want to represent or digitize collections; draft a survey of legal contracts and language  being used on websites for moving image on line access; and working on outreach to public access stations.

Other issues include looking at who is using PBCore and how, and developing sessions for the Joint Technical Symposium in Toronto in June 2007 and for AMIA’s 2007 meeting in Rochester.

In addition, as the Library of Congress revisits its National Film Preservation Plan from 1997, there is considerable support for including funds for television and video this time around. (Funding for television preservation was excluded from the previous legislation.)  LC is starting to prepare for reauthorization of this legislation, which will involve research into the current state of moving image preservation, progress reports on prior plans, and recommendations for future funding. 

Given this opportunity, we will encourage AMIA members to participate in LC’s efforts by providing documentation and recommendations that will make a strong case for including television in the next round of funding authorizations.  In this context, it may also be necessary to revisit the status of the National Television Preservation Foundation.

Video from all the sessions of the Culture, Commerce and Public Media conference held in June by WNET and Intelligent Television are available for viewing. Highlights include presentations by PBS President Paula Kerger; WNET CTO Ken Devine; PTV Project Director Nan Rubin; Orlando Bagwell of the Ford Foundation, and Mary Rasenberger of the Library of Congress. All files are in MPEG-4, and can be viewed with Quicktime.

The The Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) has produced an extensive study of locally-based television archives. Local Television: A Guide to Saving Our Heritage examines television preservation at local stations through a collection of case studies:

• Local Television: A Guide to Saving Our Heritage
• Case Study: KSTP and the Minnesota Historical Society
• Case Study: Northeast Historic Film/Maine Television Stations
• Case Study: WGBH in Boston
  
• Case Study: The Pennsylvania Cable Network
• Case Study: The Arkansas Educational Television Network

Wikinews has an interview with Paul Gerhardt of the BBC Creative Archive. Two quotes are especially interesting:

“We want people to make full use of this content, whether they cut and paste it or whether they share it, and we completely accept that we’ve got a bit of a contradiction at the moment by saying UK-only and yet encouraging people to put it on their sites to share it with others, because you can’t expect people to have geo-IP restriction technology,” admits Mr Gerhardt. “We’re thinking hard about how to deal with this after the pilot – at the moment it’s quite likely that we’re probably going to need to find a distribution partner outside of the UK.”

“We will make all our archive available, under different terms, over the next five to ten years, at a pace to be determined. There would be three modes in which people access it – some of the content would only be available commercially, for the first five year or so after broadcast, say. The second route is through a ‘view again’ strategy where you can view the programmes, but they’d be DRM-restricted. And the third mode is Creative Archive. Over time, programmes would move from one mode to another, with some programmes going straight to the Creative Archive after broadcast.”

Technorati Tags: BBC, Television Archives

The NYT reports:

“On Saturday Brazil’s government announced that Radiobrás, its official news agency, would make its archives and all its future reporting available under a Creative Commons license. The site housing the collection, which includes 150,000 photographs, was designed with free open-source software.”

The INA is setting a new standard for making television archives publicly accessible.

From the IHT:

One of the world’s leaders in digital audio and video has opened up its vault to the public, putting thousands of hours of radio and television recordings on the Internet for free.

Historic footage of Charles de Gaulle, Marc Chagall, Edith Piaf and Bob Marley, for instance, are available in small excerpts at www.ina.fr in a variety of formats, for both high-speed and low-speed Internet connections…

About 80 percent of the collection is free. For copyrighted material, INA charges €1 to €3, or $1.29 to $3.86, for the purchase of a 48-hour viewing window or €1 to €12 for full downloads.

The IHT notes that the site is receiving about five million visits a day, and the INA is adding about 5,000 hours of footage per year to the public collection.

Technorati Tags: Television Archives