Preservation

With over 50 years of television and video history already behind us, a national strategy to preserve these fragile materials has yet to be implemented in any consistent or concerted manner. This is true despite the fact that, during the past three decades, the safeguarding of television has been articulated on several occasions as a public policy priority on the national agenda to preserve America's cultural heritage.

Many of the earliest television programs were produced on 35mm film, while local television news was captured on 16mm film until the 1980's. Like other film productions, these materials suffer from the typical variety of film maladies, including vinegar syndrome, shrinkage and damage through mishandling or improper storage. The arrival of videotape altered and occasionally enhanced the production of television materials, but further complicated their preservation. Magnetic recording media is a less-than-ideal preservation format. A shorter shelf life, equipment dependence, binder instability, erasure, dropout, print-through are all factors that can limit videotape's ability to preserve image and sound information for the long term. The use of videotape by video artists, home videographers and independent media producers has moved this crisis out of the television station, directly impacting all aspects of the moving image documentation of our most recent culture.

"The American television and video heritage is now at a crossroads. One direction leads toward catastrophic losses of film and videotape… Another direction leads toward the managed preservation of extant television and video materials that bear an important relationship to American history and culture regardless of their reuse potential or monetary value."

Library of Congress Report, Television and Video Preservation 1997