WGBH's New Building and Video Archive

Not far from the BC campus, the new headquarters of WGBH, Boston's public television/public radio station, opened this week to much fanfare. Much of the attention has focused on the media element of the building itself, a "digital skin" presenting changing LED images over the cars on the Massachusetts Turnpike passing beneath it.

(See "Three new buildings about communication are also designed to communicate" for more on the WGBH headquarters and two other communication-related buildings all designed by the same architectural firm.)

WGBH has also introduced the WGBH OpenVault, a selection of streaming video clips and interview transcripts from several of the station's current and past programs.

Designed to encourage educators and scholars in higher education to incorporate these materials into classroom curricula and outside study [says 'GBH in a press release], Open Vault includes over 500 streaming video clips and more than 1,000 interviews....

Among the programs drawn from for the OpenVault are:

• *New Television Workshop, an experimental video art series on the air from1974 to 1993
• *Say Brother (now Basic Black), an African American public affairs series with programs from 1968 to 1982
• *the Ten O’Clock News, a Boston-based nightly news program including stories on the African American community and busing from 1974 through1991
• *interviews from two WGBH series, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, originally broadcast in 1989, andVietnam, A Television History, first presented in 1983

Access to Historic Television Materials

An interesting essay in the latest edition of Cinema Journal looks at the availability of historic TV footage for scholars and what they can do to help assure that more is collected, preserved, and made accessible for research.

"The truth is that a great deal of television's history has been lost over the years," writes Margaret Compton of the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia, "but, despite this, more programs exist than you may know of...."

Archival TV collections in places outside the major centers of New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, says Compton, preserve "thousands of obscure, non-prime-time, or local shows [that are] vitally important in studying the full history of television."

Archivists, she says, "want to save as much television material as we can, whether 'low' culture (cable access) or 'high' culture (PBS, Bravo), public service spot or prime-time sitcom."

Their efforts, Compton writes, are hampered by the massive volume of television content, by the technical challenges of obsolete formats and equipment, digital conversion, file migration, and data storage, and by budget and staff cuts at libraries, archives, museums, and historical societies.

Scholars, for their own benefit and for that of television history, can help, she says:

"[I]n order for archives to succeed in their missions, they need the patronage and support of scholars. The number of annual research inquiries and visits can drive or enhance existing archival budgets. Scholars' interest in and demand for rare materials can spur partnerships (and justifications) for funding grants."

The alternative, adds Compton, may be to rely for TV scholarship on those programs that commercial interests and rights holders determine will be released on DVD.

"Yet if scholars write only about the programs that are available on DVD or currently being broadcast, then they miss out on most of television's history."

Compton's article, "The Archivist, the Scholar, and Access to Historic Television Materials" (BC login required) is part of a special "In Focus" section of Cinema Journal on "The Archive in the 21st Century."

(Thanks to my colleague Sharon Black at UPenn's Annenberg School for Communication Library for pointing out the essay)

TV Series in the Media Center

(From Books & Bytes in Major Mail)
The O'Neill Library Media Center's collection of TV series on DVD and video continues to grow. New additions in the past few months include:

Arrested Development, Seasons 1 & 2
Boston Legal, Seasons 1 & 2
Dawson's Creek, Complete Series
Deadwood, Seasons 1 & 2
Lost, Season 1
The Mind of Mencia, Seasons 1-2
The OC, Seasons 1 & 2
Oz, Complete Series
Queer As Folk, Seasons 1-4
Will & Grace, Seasons 1-5

We've also added new seasons of several series already in the collection, including complete series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, and The West Wing.

For a longer, though not comprehensive, list of available series (new and old), see http://www2.bc.edu/~lissk/tvshows.html

Will TV Remain the Dominant Mass Medium?

Will the Internet kill television? Are scripted TV shows obsolete? Will television remain a viable medium for advertisers?

These are some the questions asked and closely examined in "Television's Future," a new report from CQ Researcher, available online via the BC Libraries.

In typical CQ fashion, the report offers historical background, a look at the current situation, statistics and survey data. It also explores the outlook moving forward amid a shifting landscape of technology and policy changes, new consumer expectations, and other developments.

Here are some excerpts:

Television is changing rapidly, and so is the TV audience. Viewers are ignoring broadcast schedules and watching programs via Internet “streams” and iPod downloads. Or they are “time-shifting” and skipping the commercials, using digital video recorders, such as TiVo, or video-on-demand television.
....

For all the ferment, however, Americans are watching more television than ever, using the new devices not to avoid traditional TV but to catch up on shows they otherwise would have missed. There's an atmosphere of experimentation and uncertainty in the industry reminiscent of the dot-com boom, but television and advertising executives insist that the future of TV is bright.
....

[T]echnology appears to be putting everything about the nature of television up for grabs. A medium that has long been primarily underwritten by advertising is watching its audience crack and break into a million pieces. Viewers accustomed to flipping through channels now are finding that their primary loyalty may be to specific programs, which in turn may be delivered to them through any number of different media.
....

One of the major questions facing the television industry today is whether its traditional means of delivery — networks of affiliated stations — can survive the changes.
....

There is endless experimentation, rapid technological change, a host of start-ups and a scramble among established companies to form new partnerships and adapt to a rapidly shifting landscape.

....

Despite the way today's young people flock to the latest gadgets and features, including Facebook and MySpace, their primary loyalty is to television. The average young person watches nearly four hours of TV a day — compared to 49 minutes playing video games — and is more likely to give television his or her undivided attention rather than any other media device...