Public Television Needs a Digital Preservation Strategy

This initiative could not have come at a better time for public television. Just as the Library of Congress has been strongly committed to preserving America’s public television programs, up to this point, the efforts have naturally been focused on preserving tens of thousands of analog videotapes where these programs reside.

Even as the need to preserve these tapes remains critical, they are no longer our only preservation challenge. The changes in television production in the last few years have been profound, and we are rapidly approaching the “tapeless environment” – where programs will live solely as “disembodied” assets, attached to their metadata, distributed and stored in a totally digital environment. This introduces an entirely new set of issues and problems relating to long-term program preservation, for which no coordinated strategy yet exists in public television.

Thirteen, PBS and WGBH, the public television partners on this project, bring an unparalleled capacity, expertise, technical resources, facilities and personnel to the arena of digital video production and preservation. Working with NYU, this project will take the first important steps to establish standards, procedures and structures to preserve major public television assets – both complete programs and program elements – which are being created, produced, distributed and preserved completely in digital forms, and which will have long term historical and cultural value to the public. The system is just now grappling with adopting technical standards and procedures for such operational functions as digital distribution of programs for broadcast and is already looking at some of these questions. It is a logical extension of this ongoing process to plan a preservation strategy at the same time.