**About the Board - Members of the Board - Preservation Research - National Film RegistryNational Film Preservation Foundation - Other Film Resources - Moving Image ArchivesTelevision/Video Preservation Study: New York Public Hearing, March 1996
          TELEVISION AND VIDEO PRESERVATION 1997:            A Study of the Current State of      American Television and Video Preservation       Volume 3: Hearing Before the Panel of the                  Library of Congress                Sheraton New York Hotel                  New York, New York                     March 19, 1996         Report of the Librarian of Congress                    TABLE OF CONTENTS                                                       Opening Remarks by William Murphy, Coordinator, CurrentState of American Television and Video Preservation ReportIntroductory Remarks by James Billington, Librarian of CongressStatements by:John Cannon, President, National Academy of Television      Arts and SciencesWilliam Boddy, Professor, Department of Speech CUNY,      Baruch College and Graduate CenterDeirdre Boyle, Associate Professor,      The New School for Social ResearchKitty Carlisle Hart, Chairman, New York State Council for     the ArtsStan Singer, Manager, NBC News ArchivesMichael Lang, Senior VP, Business Affairs, ABC Broadcast      Operations and EngineeringJoel Kanoff, Associate Director, Video Services, ABC NewsDoug McKinney, Director of Archives, CBS NewsDonald Decesare, Vice President, Operations, CBS NewsJac Venza, Director of Cultural and Arts Programs, WNET-TVJudy Crichton, Executive Producer, The American Experience, WGBH-TVPeter Adelstein (Image Permanence Institute), Chairman,      ANSI Technical Committee IT9Peter Brothers, President, SPECS BROS, LLCRobert Haller, Manager, Anthology Film ArchivesDuane Watson, Aaron and Clara Greenhut Rabinowitz Chief     Librarian for Preservation, New York Public LibraryBarbara London, Associate Curator, Video, Department of Film,      Museum of Modern ArtDavid Weiss, Executive Director, Northeast Historic FilmGraham Leggat, President, Board of Directors, Media AllianceGloria Walker, Community Organizer Television Coordinator,      Deep Dish TV Network/Educational Video CenterStephen Vitiello, Director of Distribution, Electronic     Arts IntermixSara MeyersonSam Suratt                 P R O C E E D I N G SJames Billington         Librarian of CongressErik Barnouw             Professor Emeritus, Columbia UniversityDavid Francis            Chief, Motion Picture Broadcasting                         and Recorded Sound Division, Library                         of CongressMona Jimenez             Executive Director, Media AllianceJames Lindner            President, Vidipax, Inc.                   Panel Moderator:    William Murphy, Coordinator, Current State of    American Television and Video Preservation Report          MR. MURPHY:  Good morning, everyone.  Pleasetake your seats, we're about to begin the day'sproceedings.          I want to first begin the day by turning themicrophone over to Dr. James Billington, the Librarianof Congress.          DR. BILLINGTON:  Thank you.  We're pleased towelcome everyone here to the Library of CongressHearing on the Current State of American Television andVideo Preservation.          Two weeks ago I presented the Library ofCongress to our Congressional Appropriations Hearingand this morning I'm happy to be on the other side ofthe room facing witnesses.  Today's hearing doesn'thave the legal and physical implications of aCongressional hearing, but it's a very important eventfor the Library of Congress and for the archivalcommunity generally, and indeed, for everyone whoshares concern about preservation of our televisionlegacy.          Our first public hearing on this subject washeld in Los Angeles on March 6th.  The panel heardstatements from archives, major studios and educatorsand others who share this concern over preservation. We heard encouraging reports from the major products ofprime time programming because as commercialenterprises they have sufficient economic incentives tomaintain their materials under reasonably goodconditions, and thus insure availability for futureuse.  On the other hand, we heard from smallerorganizations with little or almost no resources tosafeguard and preserve the valuable television videomaterials in their care.          This is the second of three public hearingsthat the Library of Congress is conducting this monthand they're intended to develop a report on the currentstate of American television and video preservation anda plan listing recommendations.  Both the report andthe plan will be published later in the year as asingle document.  This activity is authorized under theAmerican Television and Radio Act of 1976--20 yearslater; it takes a little while to get around to thesethings in Washington, as you may have heard.  But it'sbeing pursued in response to a recommendation morerecently from the National Film Preservation Board,which is another Congressionally created body for whichwe have a responsibility at the Library of Congress,and also from the many groups and individuals whohelped draft Redefining Film Preservation, A NationalPlan, which the Library of Congress published in 1994.          Now the American Television and Radio Act of1976 authorized the Library of Congress to establishand maintain archives whose purpose is to preserve apermanent record of the broadcast programs which arethe heritage of the people of the United States and toprovide access to such programs to historians andscholars without encouraging or causing copyrightinfringement.  These hearings and the report to followwill help the Library develop and refine ATRA'Spolicies--that's the acronym for American Televisionand Radio Archive--to insure that we carry out our workin concert with the other archives and libraries, andwith production and broadcast organizations.           These hearings and the report then parallelour earlier film preservation study in severalimportant ways.  First, we seek the same goals; thatis, to preserve the American heritage.  In this case,television and video, and make it more accessible foreducational use.  Second, to obtain a wide range ofviews and opinions representative of the diverseinterest that exists in the creation, preservation andresearch use of moving images in all its aspects,including arts and entertainment, news and documentary,public affairs, video art, community video, just toname some of the largest categories.    Thirdly, wewish to encourage other archives and libraries to workwith the Library of Congress to accomplish the verydifficult task of preserving television video andmaking them available.  Fourth, we wish to address theproblem of funding, television and video preservationsprograms, both in public archives and industry, no easytask at a time when resources are scarce, relative tothe preservation workload ahead.  Public and privatepartnerships are essential and during the course ofthese hearings we hope to receive your recommendationson how these kinds of partnerships can be established.          There are other parallels with the filmpreservation report worth mentioning.  Like Americanfilm, much of the early history of television, as I amsure most of you aware has already been lost,broadcasts were live and kinescope or film recordingswere used selectively, Ampex introduced a videotaperecording technology in 1956, and since then theindustry has manufactured or adopted numerousincompatible video formats making technologicalobsolence a major archival issue.  Like nitrocellulose,the staple of the film industry until 1951, videotapehas proven to be both a blessing and a curse.  We'veentrusted our historical and cultural images tovideotape and yet it's vulnerable to degradation anddestruction.  Like film, everything associated withvideo preservation is expensive, including specializedstorage facilities, electronic equipment, a skilledtechnical staff, and reformatting costs.  The verynotion of reformatting large collections of videotapeis a daunting one because their volume already exceedsthe means of most organizations.          Yet the rewards for safeguarding andpreserving our television and video heritage areimmeasurable, no one can fully understand who we are asa people and what we've become as a society withouthaving access to the recordings created by televisionand video production during the last 50 years. Historians, sociologists and other scholars, evenpoliticians and parents, debate the causal relationshipof television to the society-at-large and the future ofsuch debates will be fruitless if the historicalevidence to pursue them does not survive.          I might say as not just the Librarian ofCongress who is responsible to the Congress of theUnited States but as somebody who has been a residentof Washington for nearly a quarter of a century, it'sbeen amazing to watch how official Washington and allits aspects increasingly feels that it's eitherlegitimize or de-legitimize as sustained, vindicated,elected, dis-elected, whatever, through this media, andtherefore, it seems to me that the interest in it andthe concern for how it functions, what its legacy is,is only going to increase.  So this problem is one thatis very much a part of coming to grips with what we arebecoming as a nation in the second half of the 20thCentury.          So in conclusion, the Library of Congressencourages all of you in the audience to write downyour opinions and recommendations an we will collectthem up to April 29th.  We hope to hear from people inwriting who don't have a chance to speak today, andtoday we will hear from a number of distinguishedindividuals, some professionals in the field, othersrepresenting important organizations, that share thegoal of preserving American television and video and towhich, as I say, we have a special responsibility underthe Congressional mandate that we're pursuing heretoday.          Before we begin, I'd like to thank DavidFrancis to my left, our admirable head of the Library'sMotion Picture Broadcasting and Recorded SoundDivision, and a long-time pioneer in the preservationbusiness on two continents--we're happy that he's onours right now; and Steve Leggett, extraordinarilyindustrious, always self-effacing, in the back of theroom back there, just does simply wonderful work forthe Motion Picture Broadcasting and Recorded SoundDivision.  I can't say too much for all they're doing. They're real saints in this pursuit of preserving thisimportant part of our cultural heritage, andparticularly for their work on this project.          And most especially the man to whom I'm goingto turn over the microphone, Bill Murphy, on loan fromour sister institution, the Washington NationalArchives and Record of Administration, who is doing anadmirable job serving as the project's coordinator, whowill moderate today's hearing and to whom I'm pleasedto turn over the microphone.          MR. MURPHY:  Thank you, Dr. Billington.  Atthis time I would like to introduce the members of thepanel.  You've already met David Francis.  To my rightis Dr. Erik Barnouw; and next Mona Jimenez, theexecutive director of the Media Alliance; and last butnot least, Jim Lindner, president of Vidipax, Inc.          And so let us begin, but before we go intothe proceedings, let me state some of the ground rulesfor the discussion and testimony in the interest ofmoving the proceeding along expeditiously during therest of the day.          First, we will ask each panel to sit togetherat the witness table when it is their turn to speak. Second, the speakers will make their presentations inthe order listed; and third, each speaker should takeapproximately ten minutes to give a statement.  If youhave a longer written statement, that too will bepublished in the record.  If you exceed your timelimit, I will try to let you know politely so that youcan bring your statement to a conclusion.  Fourth,please speak into the microphone so that you can beheard in the back of the room.  Your statement and thediscussion are being recorded and transcribed and youwill receive a copy of the transcript for your review. Fifth, the Library of Congress panel will ask questionsand make comments when each group of witnesses hascompleted their statements.            I'm sorry we don't have enough time to acceptquestions or comments from the floor, from theaudience; but I encourage all of you to send us writtenstatements which will be considered in the report.          This is all I'm going to say, and so withthat let us begin with our first witness, Mr. JohnCannon of the National Academy of Television Arts andSciences.  Good morning, Mr. Cannon.          MR. CANNON:  Good morning.  I am thepresident of the National Academy of Television Artsand Sciences, and first of all let me tell you aboutwho we are.  We do represent I think goodness, kindnessand we are the embodiment of not-for-profit activity,we are statesmen of the industry; but putting all thataside, we have a remarkable structure.  We representvirtually the entire United States.  We represent about95 per cent of television in the United States and theconcrete evidence of that is that we make availablelocal awards, local Emmy awards throughout the country. And it is our belief that television is not in New Yorkand Los Angeles exclusively, that television really ispeople in many, many cities and many, many places, andwe, because of our structure, can reach out.          I want to talk to you this morning aboutthinking of preservation of television material,documentaries and recorded history throughout theUnited States rather than solely thinking about greatshows that we all saw on network television.  But ofcourse, again by our structure, because we representthe Emmy, the Emmy is the terribly, terriblydistinguished award.  In the world, anywhere you go,everybody knows the Oscar, everybody knows the Emmy. Now there are very few awards like that.  I can giveyou two or three, four more, but by and large otherawards are--they're nice, they're somewhat conveniencesfor having dinners, and kind of warming up for the mainevent; but the only people unhappy about Emmys arethose who don't win them.  Everybody wants an Emmy. And you would have to sit in the office or run from theoffice, which I frequently like to do, about peoplecalling and saying they should have won and Emmy andhow unjust the world is.  But putting that aside, wefind that--maybe I shouldn't put it aside, but really Ifind it very flattering and it only emphasizes howtruly great this Emmy is.          So when we talk about having archives, andthis is something very, very good, this is the kind ofthing we have a total commitment to at leastphilosophically, if we can't do it physically which Idon't think we can do, but from the very creation ofthis Academy we have always been proponents of it andwe have found that the educational world has been quitemarvelous at this and the Academy, which began in LosAngeles and New York, began this kind of activity.  Iknow I was president at one time of the New YorkChapter and we had a very active relationship with NYUin preserving materials.  But we found that from anational viewpoint that we couldn't possibly doanything meaningful.            So we support all kinds of organizations thatwant to do this and I'm sure you're all aware of thevery, very  major commitment that the Museum of Radioand Television has, and they have a great deal of moneyand they just opened, if you saw in The New York Timesyesterday, they opened a branch, $16 million in BeverlyHills.  And I do know that Mr. Paley, who started this,I don't think he ever made the short walk which is onlyone block from what is called Black Rock, CBS, over toABC, it's from 53rd Street to 54th Street, and he nevermade that walk, but he did one day decide he would goover and see Leonard Goldenson.  So he made the walk,went up to see Leonard Goldenson, he said, "Leonard, Iwant you to support something," and it was his museum. And it never stopped from that point on.  I've neverseen anything in our industry supported so widely andwith such deep pockets as that museum.  So what yourrelationship is with that, I don't know.  I will askyou later on what it is.            But I would like to focus a bit on some ofthe things that we have done in our Academy and maybethat we can open up some windows here for yourthinking.  We had, oh, ten years ago, suggested thateach of our chapters encourage their community--let'ssay Phoenix, Arizona--to establish an archival repositof what had been the best of television in Phoenix. Now this concept I think has a lot of merit.  We cannow envision--we have 17 cities and regions which as Itell you covers most of the United States; but I thinkit's very interesting if you're in Miami to have aplace you can go and see what has been the best ofMiami television.  And I can further see occasionswhere people would gather in the industry to reviewtheir industry and all that's been accomplished there. Cities do this, local television is very, very strong,and people who have made great contributions totelevision in all the local markets are honored. They're honored by our organization and otherorganizations.  But this is a step further.  It's noteasy to do.  I would also encourage them to sendmaterial to the museum; but I think maybe if theCongress, if the Library of Congress would do this, itwould have more impetus, it would have more motivation. But I try to open, as I say, open new vistas for youhere and I think this is something that I don't thinkyou'll hear from anybody else, of the concept of howmuch material there is that only those people,generally speaking only those people in their owncommunities saw and were a part of.  But that to me isvery, very valid and it fulfills what television shouldbe.          We feel that television is--the viewer shouldbe the boss of television.  The view is the one whomakes all the decisions.  And nobody forces anybody towatch anything.  Television will never be, or when wesay television today we mean all of broadcasting, thetelecommunications, whether it be satellite cable--thisis all one family, one experience really.  But it isthe viewer that sets the standard an all the viewer hasto do is turn it off.  And so television will never bebetter than the viewer demands it to be and the more weas an Academy, our dedication is to excellence, and weare constantly talking to the people in the communityif we can and tell them to be as demanding as they can.           We have a project in the Academy calledCreating Critical Viewers.  This is to educate youngpeople, the high school age, how to watch television. We don't want them to grow up and be couch potatos.  Sowe have made a very major effort and invested verymajor money in this so that we now have in 17 chaptersaround the country, we have a paid administrator whodoes this, and we engage--each chapter engages somebodyfrom the educational world who can communicate with theschools.  Television people are good at communicatingwith the public in general, but they are not educatorsand they don't quite know how to get into that world. But this is evidence of what can be done, what can bedone for the public, and I think that's what we shouldall think about and that's why we should preserve thebest of telecommunications, the best of these effortsfor the public, not for private collectors, but forthose who can benefit for the most, so we have a trueheritage to pass on.  And we in the Academy can educateyoung people so that they come out with a critical eye. We think that's very good.          And also it's very encouraging that themanagement, the station managers around the countryencourage this.  They do not find it a threat to theircommercial profits.  They agree that the better viewthey have, the better television they'll all do.  Thereis no downside to doing good television and there's nodownside to having a program that doesn't have a bigaudience either.  In News and Documentary, Dr.Billington was a presenter at our News and DocumentaryAwards.  PBS has always done very, very well in thoseawards because they dedicate the time to it.  And onthe commercial networks, sometimes we don't get as highquality, although that varies, there's some very highquality actually in the networks; but if you put asideevery so often the profit motive and say what can we dothat is the best for the public, it will happen.          So what we can do here by talking to you issee if we can give you some ideas and give you afeeling for the whole broad spectrum of television inthe 50 States of the United States, with which we havea relationship.            I thank you all, and first of all being hereis annulus; but particularly to the Library and itseffort, I think this is very timely and it's a stepforward, and just couldn't be any more admirable.  So Ithank you very much for listening to my few words and Iwould be very pleased to talk to you and answerquestions.  Maybe I'll ask you some questions.          MR. MURPHY:  Thank you very much, Mr. Cannon. Questions or comments?  David?          MR. FRANCIS:  I was very interested in whatyou said about the idea, I think you used Phoenix asthe example--          MR. CANNON:  Yes.          MR. FRANCIS:  --of selecting in the differentchapters the programs which are important as far asthat part of the country is concerned, because one ofthe big problems with television is there is so much ofit and it's not all national.          Now it seems that this idea could bedeveloped by the Academy so that each area was decidingwhat they considered were the most important programs. I think that would be a very valuable service, and itcould lead to those programs being preserved in thatarea.  What do you think about this?  How successfulhave you been so far?          MR. CANNON:  Well, it didn't quite work. These things take a great deal of incentive and effort. The fire has to build up, you know.  I think though I'mvery glad to hear what you say.  I think that it'sworth another try.  Ten years ago when we advocatedthis, I don't think the Academy was doing all the goodthings it's doing now.  We have a very majorscholarship program now, we're giving two $20,000scholarships and that's pretty good, because I lookaround and there aren't that many $20,000 scholarshipsbeing given out.  Most scholarships are for $2,000 andthat will buy you books maybe, or $5,000; but wedecided to go into this in a very major way.          The reason I cite this is that atmosphereschange and when people realize what can be done andwe're doing these things, maybe this is another step wecould take.  I really think it's worthwhile.  And if wecould get a letter particularly from Dr. Billington, ifI could get a letter saying we encourage this, thiskind of encouragement would be a very good thing for usand might bring this to a meeting and that's the waythese things start.  We'd have to think out how thiscan trickle some place, as I wanted to do it with themuseum, but I think they've got a pretty full plateover there.  Maybe we can do this through you.  But weneed to have it go somewhere too, as well as--do youagree with that?          MR. FRANCIS:  Yes, certainly.          MR. MURPHY:  Jim?          MR. LINDNER:  You were mentioning the role ofeducation in regard to your membership and there's noquestion that your membership is certainly the moversand shakers of the television industry in many regards,and I was wondering since the membership is so largewhether the Academy has published any brochures orother information to help educate your members on how to take care of their materials?          MR. CANNON:  No.  We never have.  No, no. That has never been done and that would never be donebecause there is no program that would call for it. But again, that's a good idea.            What we offer here is an availability ifsomebody wanted to do that, the Academy has thestructure that allows for a lot of communication, ifsomebody wants to come along and do that.  What betterway for distribution than to use us.  That might be agood joint effort with somebody.          MR. MURPHY:  Okay.  Thanks again, Mr.--          MR. CANNON:  Dr. Barnouw, I wanted to--          MR. MURPHY:  Go ahead.          MR. CANNON:  As I was joking with Dr.Barnouw, I said that I read his book since I was threeyears old, he said I was very precocious when I didthat, and I said but he wrote with such clarity, howdoes he know that I didn't?  But I want to take apersonal moment here to ask you, Professor Barnouw, ofwhat you do now.  Do you lecture still at Columbia? Are you still writing book?  I'd like to know that.          DR. BARNOUW:  I'm not lecturing at Columbia. I've retired some 20 years ago.          MR. CANNON:  I know that, but I thought--          DR. BARNOUW:  I am still writing books, yes.          MR. CANNON:  All right.          DR. BARNOUW:  I don't want to make this apersonal advertising program.          MR. CANNON:  Okay.          DR. BARNOUW:  Yes, I just published a bookcalled "The Media Marathon," essentially a memoir whichgoes to my life in all the media.          MR. CANNON:  I'll certainly be looking forthat.  It's a privilege to be here with you.  Yes, Dr.Billington?          DR. BILLINGTON:  I was wondering if eitherthe Academy or the museum, which you mentioned, youmentioned in connection with the museum deep pockets. One of the fundamental problems with preservation isthat there are virtually no pockets at all.          MR. CANNON:  That's right.          DR. BILLINGTON:  And I wondered if you hadany thoughts as to how first of all you organization,which does have all the prestigious and importantpeople in it, do either they or the museum have anysystematic institutional stated commitment to thepreservation of the television heritage or have therebeen any major meetings or pronouncements devoted toit?  I just wondered as a matter of history.          MR. CANNON:  I would highly recommend and Ithink I mentioned to Mr. Murphy when he came to see me,I highly recommend that you meet with first of allFrank Bennick, who is the chairman of it, and he is thepresident and CEO of The Hearst Corporation, all oftelevision and all of the newspapers too.  I think thatwould be a very worthwhile visit for you to have.  Theyare the ones who would have that kind of resource and,of course, that's what they are doing.  They arepreserving television.  The Academy no, the Academydoes not and I don't think it's likely that the Academywould get resources exclusively for that.  Anythingcould happen, but for when we talk about financialwherewithal and also the structure and actually doingit, I'd say the museum would be my prime target if Iwere you.          DR. BILLINGTON:  I see.          MR. FRANCIS:  Bill, can I ask something? Could I ask one small follow-up?   Do you actuallymanage to preserve the Emmy award programs, theprograms to which you give the awards?            MR. CANNON:  Yes, we do.  We keep, one way oranother, when we do a--when we do a telecast, by ourcontract one copy of it comes to us.  Generally thenetworks keeps a copy too, the networks keep copies ofthings like that.          MR. FRANCIS:  But the individual programs?          MR. CANNON:  No, not in--only winningprograms or--well, for instance, News and Documentary,we get some marvelous material and it's so much of itthat we call up schools and see if they can pick it upor we just have to throw it out.  There's just not--there aren't enough buildings to put all of this in. They are going to take all our news and documentarywinning programs and preserve them.  So we'd like tofind more opportunities like that and we'll findanother college, I think we can do it for sports, andthis concept of having someone's resource for it--welike the schools, we think the schools are great atthis and they give a lot of attention to it and it'svery beneficial to them because students of thecommunications departments can refer to this materialand it's quite wonderful.          But for an organization such as ours that hasno many award structures and so many awards programs todo, our biggest problem is to clean out the shelves andkeep it moving out of our premises.  We can't find abuilding big enough to hold all that.          MR. MURPHY:  Thank you very much indeed, Mr.Cannon.          MR. CANNON:  Thank you.          MR. MURPHY:  I think in the interest of timewe have to move on and thanks again.          MR. CANNON:  Thank you.  I hope you have avery successful day and a very rewarding experience. It's quite admirable.          MR. MURPHY:  We've been informed that KittyCarlisle Hart will be delayed, so we will move on tothe next panel of educators and we'll ask those peopleto come and take a seat.          Well, good morning to you, and let us beginwith William Boddy.          MR. BODDY:  Thank you.  I'm going to read afive-page statement, so I should be ten minutes.          Thank you for the opportunity to speak to youthis morning about a subject, television preservation,which is crucial to the work of scholars and educatorsacross many fields and many academic institutions.  Mywords today will, I hope, build--          MR. MURPHY:  Excuse me, could you pull themicrophone closer?          MR. BODDY:  Sure.  My words today will, Ihope, build upon previous testimony in Los Angeles fromeducators, including Janet Bergstrom who spoke as arepresentative from the Society for Cinema Studies, anorganization I have been actively involved with forover a decade.  I would first like to acknowledge thework of the Library of Congress in film preservation,including the hearings which produced a 1994 report,"Redefining Film Preservation, A National Plan."  Iwill defer to the expertise of others here andelsewhere who will speak to you on technical matters ofphysical preservation and legal practice; what I wishto add is simply the voice from a community of scholarsand educators whose work would be immeasurablyimpoverished without access to the national heritage oftelevision and video material.            While occasionally arcane and technicalsounding, the work of television and videopreservation, I believe, serves to support nothing lessthan the fundamental need of citizens in a democracy tounderstand their collective past and to actively shapetheir own cultural and political futures.   I'd like toaddress the four central issues of storage, access,public/private partnerships, and funding, from thepoint of view of someone who earns a living teachingand writing about the history of American television.       To briefly introduce myself, my work in televisionhistory began with a doctoral dissertation at New YorkUniversity, a dissertation which ended up as a book atthe University of Illinois entitled Fifties Television. Since then I have contributed two dozen articles onU.S. broadcast history to scholarly journals andmonographs in this country and abroad.  The subjects ofthese have ranged from television broadcasting effortsby CBS and others in the early 1930s to the post-warprogramming strategies of NBC and CBS, the quiz showscandals of the late fifties, the TV violence campaignsof the early 1960s, the rise and fall of the classictelevision Western, the contested role of Americantelevision programming in the U.S. image abroad, andthe history of independent video in the United States. I'm currently writing a book on the social history ofelectronic technology for Oxford University Press, aswell as a book on The Twilight Zone for the BritishFilm Institute's TV Classics Series.          Before turning to these larger questions ofwhat we ought to be preserving, allow me first todirect some specific remarks to the four issues ofstorage, access, public/private partnership, andfunding, which were raised in the Library of Congress'sreport on film preservation.  While, it seems to methat these can, in large measure, be addressed insimilar terms to those involved in film preservation,there are a number of novel aspects to the world oftelevision preservation.  Concerning storage, forexample, I believe the Library can make an importantcontribution by supporting the research anddissemination of optimal methods for the preservationof original materials and the conversion of originalmaterials to new storage media.          It might be noted that the term "televisionpreservation" involves original materials ranging from35mm and 16mm film stocks as well as a plethora oftechnologically obsolete or endangered electronicrecording systems.  Unlike theatrical filmmaking, wherefilm formats and viewing technologies have remainedremarkably stable historically, television demands thepreservation of rapidly changing hardware systems aswell as program material.  It seems to me that theLibrary of Congress can lead in the sharing ofexpertise concerning these historically fragiletechnological platforms, in order to insure continuedaccess to the programming they support.   Likewise, theLibrary can pool technical expertise in the conversionof these technologically endangered televisionmaterials to more permanent and accessible electronicformats, with the recognition that any new formats arethemselves likely to prove historically transient. Finally, as in film preservation, it seems to beprudent to pursue both the conservation of originalmaterials and the conversion to new electronic storagesystems.       The problem of access to television and videomaterials presents similar continuities and exceptionsto the model of film preservation.  There are commongoals in insuring the widest possible access forscholars and educators to television collections, insimplifying procedures for copyright clearances andfair use, in enabling remote access to informationabout the holdings of private and public archives, andfinally in moving to direct electronic access to non-copyrighted television and video materials.  Theseissues of access are likely to be more complex andvexing than the challenges of physical preservation andstorage, and copyright holders need to be protectedfrom unauthorized commercial exploitation of theirwork, a concern more urgent with the prospect of acommercial Internet trafficking in full motion videoand sound.          However, and this is the most deeply feltpoint I would like to make this morning, there is anurgent need to preserve the distinction betweeneducational and commercial uses of television and videoarchive material, and with that distinction, thepractice of fair use of copyrighted material byscholars and educators, whether for research, classroominstruction, presentations at professional conferencesor scholarly publication.  The Library of Congresscould encourage archives to devise donor agreements tomaintain this fundamental distinction in order toinsure access by scholars to copyrighted depositmaterial.  Issues of copyright may be more complex intelevision than in film;  unlike the model of thestudio feature film, networks and station operatorsrarely own copyrights for the works they broadcast,outside of news and sports.  Copyright is more oftenheld by individual production companies operating in anunstable  business marked by a rapid turnover of firms.          Regarding issues of private/ publicpartnerships and the funding of televisionpreservation, copyright owners must, I think, assumethe major responsibility for insuring the physicalpreservation of, and scholarly access to, theirtelevision and video material.  However, the Library ofCongress can support these efforts by sharinginformation about the storage and transfer of primary materials and by encouraging and coordinating remotelyaccessible databases of archive holdings.  Publicefforts should also be extended to support thepreservation of vulnerable television and videomaterial which is either outside of copyright or whichlacks immediate commercial prospects for its copyrightholder.  A public/private partnership in the form of afederally chartered foundation could also supportefforts to preserve the diverse voices of artists andindependent video makers whose television work mayexist in endangered video formats and equallyendangered non-profit institutions.          I would like to conclude by speaking not of aten most-wanted list of disappeared programs, but moregenerally about the special challenges of televisionand video preservation in deciding upon what is worthyof preservation.  It is clear that television archivesconfront a fundamental challenge in their collectivetask; unlike the preservation of the collection ofunique one-run theatrical films, the basic definitionof a television artifact can be confounding.  In thecommercial television medium, which thrives on variousforms of seriality, ought one to collect series pilots,or some sense of representative episodes, or entireseasons, or multi-year runs of a particular series? Even compared to the thousands of American feature filmof the Hollywood era, the universe of televisionmaterial potentially available for archiving isstaggering, even more so in view of the on-goingproliferation of program outlets via direct broadcast,satellite, cable, and broadcasting.  Despite thismultiplication of program sources, many of themrecycling material from previous seasons, meaningfulscholarly access to television's past cannot be insuredto commercial syndication and to advertising supportedcable, no matter how single-mindedly devoted to variousforms of nostalgia they may be.          There is a host of contingencies whichdetermines the entrance and survival of any particularnetwork program in the syndication market, ranging fromthe original program genre and number of episodes, tothe commercial and ideological needs of the currentcommercial programmer and broadcast advertiser. Television lacks film's cultural memory bank of therepertory cinema or the video shop, and   In anunderstanding of television's role in our nation isimpossible without scholarly access to a much wideruniverse of program materials than those of interest tothe demographically minded programmers at Nick at Niteor The Family Channel.          Given this situation, let me offer anhistorian's plea for the preservation of the widestrange of television material.  Invaluable publicinstitutions like the Museum of Television and Radiohave taken on the dual task of both celebrating thatwhich it judges of highest quality in the medium andalso of assembling a collection which will illuminatetelevision's role as cultural and political agenda-setter and battleground.  However, historians needaccess not only to the prestigious prime time networkhits, but also to less celebrated television material,from low prestige genres, from affiliate fringe time,from independent and community stations, and from thechaotic world of small format video and public accesscable.          My own scholarly interests have been directedat understanding the role of television programming inwider cultural, intellectual and political contexts,including the shifting definitions of citizenship andthe public sphere, the relation of Americanintellectuals to mass culture, the policy debatesregarding broadcast regulation, the effects oftelevision violence, and the international role ofAmerican commercial television.  Addressing these sortsof questions in an historical context in a meaningfulway is not likely to be accomplished by looking at afew critically privileged programs.  Instead,understanding how commercial television becameentangled in such larger cultural and political issuesrequires a broad consideration of as many relevantprograms as possible; a consideration only possiblewith access to the resources of private and publictelevision archives.            Much of the most productive recent historicalwork in film and television studies has indeed focusedon the culturally marginal and excluded, guided in partby the proposition that what a society pushes to themargins of cultural expression can say a great dealabout what is central to its beliefs and practices. Television preservation, therefore, must make availableto future researchers and scholars the full range ofwhat is to be found on our nation's screens.  Likewise,future historians considering some of today's loudestpublic and political controversies associated withtelevision,  like the debates over the effects ofnegative political advertising or the culturalconsequences of so-called trash TV, will depend ontheir access to the often culturally denigratedprograms which provoked these controversies.  My pointis simply that contemporary critical taste cannot offerassurance about what future historians will findrevealing about our contemporary culture, and absencesuch assurances, the prudent course seems to be to tryto preserve the diversity of our televisionenvironment.          The challenges of preservation and access tothe uncountable hours of our television past andpresent, a medium of both great cultural and politicalpower and of an almost willful ephemorality, are indeeddaunting.  While my life in the classroom exposes me tostudents who bring what seems to be increasingly shortcultural memories, there is also a genuine hunger amongstudents and among the public for non-nostalgicconfrontations with our cultural history.  Astelevision increasingly becomes the medium forhistorical representation and popular memory, it isvital that its own place in history be available forscrutiny and contestation.  The often unglamorous workof television preservation is the necessary ground forsuch democratic interrogation and we neglect it at ourperil.  Thank you.          MR. MURPHY:  Thank you, Mr. Boddy.  I thinkwe're going to skip Peter Herford for now and go on toDeirdre Boyle.  Good morning.          MS. BOYLE:  Thank you very much.  Thank youfor inviting me to speak here today at this hearing. Others will make the case for why broadcast televisionnews and entertainment programming need to bepreserved.  Rather than add to that resounding chorus,I will simply say that growing up in the '50s, as amember of the first television generation, I respondedactively to television.  At 12 I appeared on a localchildren's show to speak out about my gripe, thatchildren should be seen and not heard.  Arguingpersuasively I believed at the time, that childrenwould never grow up to be effective citizens andresponsible adults if they were prevented fromexpressing their thoughts and testing their ideas; Iexercised the power of television to shape publicopinion.  I thought we all had that right, that thatwas what television was there for.                Because television has not always served asan arena for public discourse and creative expression,members of my generation when presented with the firstconsumer video technology in the late '60s responded bysetting out to re-invent television, to create aparallel system to the then monolithic world of networkTV.  They were inspired by the ideas of MarshallMcLuhan and other media gurus; by the social andpolitical movements sweeping the country at the time--and the world I should add; and by a revolution in thearts that celebrated process, not product.          Some of the most talented members of thatfirst TV generation joined video collectives, notbroadcast unions, producing lively video programs seenin Soho lofts, public library basements, communitycenters, on public access channels, in alternative artspaces, off-off Broadway theaters, and later on, onpublic television, network TV and eventually pay cable. It was independent video pioneers like TVTV, workingoutside the industry, who first brought the portapak toa major media event, the 1972 Presidential NominatingConventions.  TVTV demonstrated the versatility ofportable video to networks still hardwired tocumbersome quad equipment, propelling the developmentof the first ENG cameras and the quick transition fromvid-film to all-video news departments, andaesthetically influencing the look of television newsand documentary programming.  Without a considerationof the contributions of video pioneers such as these,any history of American television, not to mentionrecent American social history, will be incomplete,distorted.          The achievements of video artists anddocumentarists, many of whom worked within theexperimental TV labs at public television stationsduring the '70s and '80s, are co-extensive withtelevision but go far beyond it.  Artists like Nam JunPaike, for instance, produced single and multiplechannel video works using video as a sculptural medium,creating environments never designed with television inmind.  The task of preserving such art work is perhapsmore daunting than tackling single-channel videotapes,but no less important if accurate records of thecultural history of the last half of this century areto be made.          My own area of research, the history ofdocumentary video makers in the '70s, led me in 1983 ona cross-country journey in search of historic tapes andtheir makers.  This was my first brush with the alreadyalarming state of video preservation.  In New Orleans,I excitedly located a tape I had read about and heardabout, only to discover as I opened the black plasticbox, a sickeningly sweet smell emanating from theencrusted white crud that covered the unplayable tape. The New Orleans Video Access Center had been inundatedand their tape archive, housed in the basement, wasbadly affected.  It was only one of many suchdisappointments encountered while researching: tapesmislabeled, tapes missing, tapes that played for fiveminutes then devolved into a series of morse code likeblack-and-white glitches, tapes made on machines thatwere unrepairable or nowhere to be found.  Housed ingarages, basements, in closets and footlockers, theprecious record of an historic period lay vulnerable tofire, flood, heat, humidity, carelessness andindifference.            I was part of the first wave of videohistorians, critics and curators who uncovered thearray of preservation problems confronting individualartists, media art centers, video distributors, fundersand exhibitors.  Since then I'm happy to reportprogress has been made in launching this vast effort atlocating historic programs, cataloguing them, providingarchivally acceptable storage for these tapes and theirplayback equipment, developing reliable, low-costmethods for cleaning, restoring, and preserving tapes,and sharing information with others similarly engaged. All sorts of partnerships have been forged.  Timeprevents me from enumerating them, but in a monographthat I wrote a few years ago for the Media Alliance,Video Preservation: Securing the Future of the Past, Idid outline some of this.  The very fact that theLibrary of Congress has agreed to this hearing and to aserious inclusion of video and television programmingwithin its preservation purview, is perhaps the bestsign that the times are a-changing.            Clearly there are economic incentives thatmotivate broadcasters' interests in the preservation ofclassic entertainment programs and the archiving ofbroadcast news and public affairs programming.  Buteconomic reasons should be the least compelling oneswhen deciding video preservation priorities.  Consider,for example, the tapes made by Broadside TV, a uniqueexperiment in local origination cable programmingproduced by community video activists in Appalachia inthe mid-'70s.  Although the characters who appear inthese tapes are not household names like Lucy or UncleWalter, they helped extend the concept of oral historyto video and gave isolated people living in the hillsand hollers of Appalachia a tool to confront stripminers, state legislators, and future generations. From the viewpoint of the social historian, the studentof American politics, communications and culture, thevalue of such tapes is immeasurable, and I'm happy toreport that this collection is housed in the Archivesof Appalachia in Tennessee.            Here's one more scenario to consider.  Ithink few people here would argue that Ken Burns'documentary series on the American Civil War was asignal broadcasting event.  By coupling earlyphotographic images--daguerro tintypes, carte-de-visitephotos--with readings from the letters and diaries ofboth famous and ordinary ordinary individuals, Burnsevoked the agony of a nation divided.  His successdepended upon the official documentary photos of battlescenes or of commanders-in-chief shot by artists likeMatthew Brady, as well as anonymous portraits of rawrecruits produced two for 12-1/2 cents.  Burns employedthe full range of photography, a visual medium barely30 years old at the time.           Imagine if you will now a documentaryproducer 100 years from now who is interested in makinga documentary about the recent Gulf War.  She wouldneed to have access to videotapes; not just to thosebroadcast as news by CNN or NBC, but those exchanged bymilitary personnel and their families during the war. It was during this war that home video became a favoredmedium for the intimate exchange of ideas, images andmemories, absorbing the functions of photography,letters and diaries.  These homemade tapes were just asmuch a part of the war record as the orchestrated imageof high-tech electronic war seen on television.          Since videotapes have come to replacesnapshots, audio tapes, Super 8 films, letters, andeven written diaries for reporting the milestones ofour lives, video has become the fabric of our familymemories and by extension of our collective socialhistory.  We in this room know that video has a limitedlifespan.  The manufacturers of videotape and recordingtechnology know this, too; but the millions of peoplewho own handicams and record Billy's birthday party,Jennifer's soccer game, and the children's wedding ontape don't know that their precious memories will fadein time to mere snow on a flickering screen.          What does this mean to a culture that hasbecome increasingly dependent on visual images for itsself-image,  its view of the world, and itsunderstanding of what is and isn't true?  What doesthis mean if our databanks of images, those public andcollective as well as those private and personal, fadeinto oblivion?  I would argue that, without evidence ofthe past to re-examine and reconsider, we becomeincreasingly vulnerable to the spin doctors of historywho reshaped the past to serve other agendas.  Theentire spectrum of video recordings, from thoseprofessionally recorded for cultural institutions likenetwork television, to those made by you and me tomemorialize the events of our lives, demands ourattention and concern.  Were the public to realize justwhat is at risk if video as a medium is dismissed asephemeral or someone else's concern, we would have aconsiderable lobby behind us and this enterprise.          And my last comment is really made as aneducator.  When I completed the book that I had beenworking on for 13 years and heaved a sigh of relief, Igave it to my graduate assistant to read to find outhow well I was communicating to someone who was bornthe very year that video and man first went to themoon.  Needless to say, Alex was not very conscious ofvideo during the period of time that is the subject ofmy book.  I was gratified that he was very enthusiasticabout what I had written and surprised at his amazementto discover that what I had to say about the '60s andthe '70s was so different from what he had learnedelsewhere in this culture.  Bell-bottoms and peacesigns and rock music of the period, was pretty much thelingering image of this time for him; and he is a veryintelligent and sensitive person.  We had a veryinteresting dialogue, and I shared a number of thesetapes with him, and it convinced me that there wasindeed a reason to make the images of this time periodavailable to younger people.  But more importantly,what really struck Alex was the sense of optimism thatpervaded this time period, an optimism that was so mucha part of my generation and that is not a part of hisgeneration, a sense that one can change the world, thatit is indeed the legacy of youth to feel empowered andto believe that it is possible to make a difference. And I think if for no other reason than this, makingthese historic materials available is necessary andperhaps increasingly a necessary counter-measure if weare to have a really vital society.  Thank you.          MR. MURPHY:  Thank you very much.  Is PeterHerford in the room?   Questions from the panel?          MS. JIMENEZ:  I have one.          MR. MURPHY:  Yes, Mona?          MS. JIMENEZ:  Yes, I was wondering if youcould describe a little bit more about access to thematerials, in addition to the physical problems thatyou were experiencing.  Where do you actually findparticularly independently produced video materials? Where do you find them--either one of you actually--through what kinds of networks and what obstacles doyou face in finding the materials?          MR. BODDY:  You're probably more expert onthis.          MS. BOYLE:  Well, let's differentiate the actof researching and searching for things in the highwaysfrom the by-ways.  As an educator I turn first to non-profit video distributors like Electronic Arts Intermixand Video Data Bank and a few sources like that,because given the infrastructure within the independentmedia community, distributors have taken on the role ofmaintaining, keeping alive, cataloguing, and otherwisemaking accessible the history of independentproduction.          There has been something of a bias toward artover documentary because art often seems to have alonger life than documentary works.  There are otherplaces to turn.  I'm not sure if Media Network stillhas their information service, but it has been a sourcefor locating more fugitive materials like documentariesthat haven't always been seen as financially lucrativein terms of distribution.  I think that people wind uphaving to read a great deal in order to find othersources.          MR. BODDY:  I would add that Electronic Arts Intermix, Video Data Bank, the Museum of Modern Art allhave very active circulating collections.  In terms ofday-to-day teaching, those are the three sources I'veused.  They also do a very good job in documentingmaterial, providing lots of information, bibliographieson artists and tapes, and are very forthcoming aboutallowing student access to material not for classroomuse.          In New York City, the Donnell Film Library,and to a small extent the Museum of Television andRadio, collects and holds this sort of independentwork.  And I agree that there is a bias toward film orvideo about artists rather than in community activismand documentary.           MR. MURPHY:  Dr. Billington?          DR. BILLINGTON:  One of the things with filmwe've done is that--well the Congress has done really--is to create this National Film Registry whereby wepick 25 sort of films for their historical, cultural,aesthetic significance every year, and that's designedto dramatize the need and also to pick out someimportant illustrative examples for preservation.  Doyou think something comparable would be possible anduseful in the world of television, and related to thatis the literature, the academic literature, does itprovide a sufficient base of sort of shared criticalstandards that would enable one to pick such in thismuch more, in a way miscellaneous and diverse world oftelevision, 25 such or some other number; we found thatto be particularly I think a useful way of dramatizingthe need for film preservation.  Would it be--we always say at the time, it's my responsibilityultimately to pick these on the base of the board'srecommendations, of course, and a lot of public input. We always say that it's not the Academy Awards, theseare not the Academy Awards, but these are historically,culturally and aesthetic significance, that's the wordthat the Congressional Act has produced.            Do you think it's possible to define such auniverse and is it desirable to dramatize the cost ofpreservation?          MR. BODDY:  I think that the National FilmRegistry has had a good effect in the film studiescommunity, particularly because it's obvious that you've looked beyond the Hollywood feature film withthe major grosses or the critical successes of aparticular year, and broadened the definitions and thecultural memory of film.  I think it also provides akind of window on the work of film preservation.  Ithink those two aspects are important for the task ofwidening our definitions of television and television'spast, especially about recovering the stuff that isn'tan Emmy-award winning show, that wasn't aired on anetwork, that nevertheless may have had an incrediblehistorical impact.  So I think that designating a broadrange of television material, to have something thatwas very mainstream and very prominent alongsidesomething like TVTV or something from that independentcommunity, would be very helpful.          The other part of the registry program, usingpublic screenings to reinvigorate the theatrical filmexperience, I don't know if there is an analogy withthe work of television preservation.  And certainly thebasic task of designating, of wading through and comingup with 25 or 75 titles, in television is a bit moredaunting.          But I think the positive aspects of makingthe work of preservation more visible and of broadeningthe cannon, of redefining what it is to think abouttelevision, I think that would help.          MS. BOYLE:  To answer the second part of yourquestion about is there a body of literature extant, Ithink there is more and more being written and ourefforts are somewhat symptomatic of that.  But I thinkthat in order to make a selection of titles topreserve, you would have to assemble a body of expertsfrom a fairly wide frame of reference because there areoverlapping areas of expertise, but then there areother areas of expertise that don't overlap at all. And there would be considerable contention I thinkwithin, say, the wider community of independent video--perhaps it's not all that different from looking at thetribes within the film community.  I think one wouldhave to throw a very wide net.           And it may be worth considering in thislarger debate criteria around endangered programsrather than only significant programming, or at leastto give them some sort of equal status.  With film, theproblems of nitrate preservation created priorities. With video, I think urgency is less easily definedtechnically, but there are certainly works that arebecoming unretrievable as time passes and there may besome need to factor that into decisions.  But likeBill, I would agree to anything that gets publicattention: if it's a list, and lists do tend to getpeople's attention, then by all means, use whateverwill work.          MR. FRANCIS:  Really, this is a follow-up onthat question.  Obviously the Library itself can onlydo so much. One of the things we're hoping that willcome out of these hearings and out of the study is thatwe can engage the whole community more in dealing withthese problems.          We've heard both here and in L.A. of theimportance of particularly non-broadcast television tothe academic community.  Would it be possible for sayS.C.S. to come up with a listing of key items, even ifit only contains 200 or 500, not currently availablewhich the academic community would like to have, sothat the final plan could address some specificprograms.  Obviously there's a rights issue here aswell, but if it was possible for say S.C.S. or anyother body to come up with this endangered televisionlist of material that would be widely used if it wasavailable,  I think this would be a very valuable stepforward because it would give us something concretewhich we could concentrate on.  Do you think that's afeasible approach?          The second part of the question is do youthink if there was agreement over this list, that theacademic community itself in order to have thesematerials available, would be prepared to assist insome small way in preserving and making available theprograms, subject obviously to copyright owner'sagreement?          MS. BOYLE:  Even though I'm wearing myacademic hat here, I wear several others, includingthat of a curator and a writer and someone who's beeninvolved in other aspects of the independent mediacommunity.  I think that there are certainly goodreasons to go with an organization like S.C.S. inmaking these choices.  But I think it leaves out someof the key players, for example, curators in museums,and the people who have been directors and producerswithin media arts organizations.  While academics mayhave interests in this area or even have close ties, Ithink that there would be some problem in having thefull breadth of independent media necessarilyrepresented in their choices.  Perhaps I'm being overlycautious here, but I think I'm a little reluctant toendorse the idea of turning it over to one academicgroup.          MR. BODDY:  Yes, I think that's appropriate. I think it's a good idea and I think that S.C.S. couldcollaborate with other people.  I think those voicesare important to bring to that question.  So I'll bringit back to S.C.S. people.          MS. BOYLE:  The other part of your questionabout whether academic institutions would be willing tolend an economic hand in this matter--I don't knowabout other academic institutions, but my own doesn'tlend economic hands to its own faculty.  So I thinkthat one has to then look to large institutions, andperhaps there is an advantage in creating partnershipswith well-endowed institutions that permit publicaccess to their collections.  But I don't know if it'srealistic to expect that this is going to be anoverwhelming response.          MR. MURPHY:  Thanks very much.  We're nowgoing to invite Miss Kitty Carlisle Hart to the witnesstable.  Good morning.          MS. CARLISLE HART:  Good morning.  Hello. Any one of these microphones will do?          MR. MURPHY:  Right in front of your nameplate.          MS. CARLISLE HART:  I see.  Now we all knowwho I am.          This is indeed a welcome opportunity to speakto this distinguished panel.  The issue of televisionand video preservation is dear to me personally, asChairman of the New York State Council on the Arts,because as you probably know--          MR. MURPHY:  Excuse me, could I ask you topull the microphone a little closer?  Yes, that's good. Thank you.          MS. CARLISLE HART:  As you probably know, Ispent quite a long time in my life in television.  Iwas on a program called To Tell the Truth for about 17years and I care a great deal about television.  It'sturned every town into a small town for me, becausepeople come toward me smiling and they remember me fromTo Tell the Truth and other shows long before that.  SoI'm a veteran of Goodson/Todman and the earlytelevision, so this is something that I care about.          Now speaking in my role as chairman of theNew York State Council--can you hear me now?  Good. Perhaps a bit of history will clarify why the Councilis concerned about television and video preservation.          The Council was an early and ardent supporterof independent video.  As early as 1966, the ArtsCouncil had already helped experimental artists presentvideo in a variety of performances and exhibitions.  Iremember the early performances and exhibitions ontelevision, and let me tell you, they were prettyexperimental.  It was almost incomprehensible, but itwas something, and it was the wave of the future, andmy people at the Council said we've got to go for it,and I believed them, so we went for it.          In 1969, the New York State Council on theArts provided a grant to start a series of videoproduction networks for young people with the publictelevision stations around the state.  When the Councilbudget increased in 1970, sadly it's decreasedremarkably, video flourished, community video centerswere established across the state from Buffalo to PortWashington.  Other groups emerged to explore thecreative potential of the medium and put it in thehands of performing and visual artists.  A study wascommissioned to create the television lab at WNET,which was really very important.          This was a time of tremendous possibility andexperimentation.  Artists like Nam June Paik andShirley Clarke were creating a new artistic medium. With small investment public funds, we created a weeklyrural cable series in the Catskills and in Jamestown. Partnerships with public television brought the artshome to homes throughout the state and around thecountry.  Innovative documentaries were being producedin ways not possible for film.          In the early 1980s the Council was fundingover 80 organizations involved in video in New YorkState.  Hundreds of productions had already beencreated and the Council was not alone in its investmentin independent video.  Other public funding agencies,the National Endowment for the Arts, the NationalEndowment for the Humanities, public television, artscouncils in many other states, were deeply involved infunding production and acquisition of this work.          In the next few years we would hear frommuseums and from distributors that their collectionsneeded to be transferred to another video format.  In avery limited way, the Council began to assist in theconservation of videotapes at the Museum of Modern Artand in the collections of several distributors.  TheCouncil felt that it was vital that the work continuedto be available to the public in the present and also,obviously, for the future.          Where are all these tapes today?  Very littleis in traditional archives.  Work of the mostinfluential community workshops is stored in barns,attics, public library stacks.  A few organizationshave made heroic efforts in providing safe haven towhole collections, like the Visual Studies Workshop inRochester.  A variety of institutions, scholars andcurators are coming forward to assure that the verydifferent creative uses of video are catalogued,conserved, and brought to the attention of the public. Working with Media Alliance, the Council has helpedbring these organizations and individuals together toshare their knowledge and foster collaborative efforts. Deborah Silverfine, the director of our electronicmedia and film program, will be submitting a statementof our activities, along with some recommendations forfuture plans.          To touch on some of our efforts, the Councilhas provided some support for cataloguing so thatregional and specialized collections are reflected inthe NAMID database being created.  The Council hasfunded both lab costs and storage space, but it can'tdo it alone.  It's not possible.  The problem is fartoo big.  We hope that the study being undertaken bythe Library of Congress will point toward newpartnerships, new solutions, and increased awareness oftelevision and video preservation needs.  And, so muchof our contemporary culture and our history is beingrecorded on video by choice or by necessity, it iscritical that we find ways for those images and soundsto endure.          Have you any questions?  It's quite a largesubject.  We all have a lot of questions.          MR. FRANCIS:  Miss Hart, the achievements ofthe Council are well-known and are incredible.  It'svery sad to hear that funding is more difficult nowthan it was in the past.          MS. CARLISLE HART:  Oh, much.          MR. FRANCIS:  We heard when we were in LosAngeles from one of the people in Florida who said thatFlorida is operating a state lottery which gives acertain amount of money towards film and televisionactivities.  I wondered whether New York State hadconsidered this; and whether you thought it was afeasible approach?  You're aware probably of what'shappening in the United Kingdom at the moment, that thelottery there is providing a resurgence of funding forall aspects of the arts.  I wondered whether on a statelevel here, and particularly in a state like New York,this was a feasible approach to rebuilding funding?          MS. CARLISLE HART:  The only time a lotterywas approached to me by the lottery director Mr. Quinnwas to do a lottery for the arts, and it died aborning,it didn't last very long.  It was not properlypublicized, it was not taken up properly, and it didn'tquite work out.  That's the only time.  I've alwaysopposed a lottery because I felt that the minute we hada lottery in this state, then the state would stopfunding the arts, because they would say you're gettingit this way, so we're not going to do it, and I wasn'tsure that it would work.          MR. FRANCIS:  Thank you.          MS. CARLISLE HART:  I have someone here namedDebbie Silverfine, who is head of our electronic mediaand film, and she's very good about answeringquestions, if you want to ask any technical questions.          DR. BILLINGTON:  Let me ask a non-technicalquestion.  First of all, thank you very much for beinghere.          MS. CARLISLE HART:  Delighted to see youagain.          DR. BILLINGTON:  For all the wonderful workyou've done over the years, which would be impossibleto fully document, but some day it's going to obviouslybecome part of our--not merely New York, but ournational history.          MS. CARLISLE HART:  Thank you.          DR. BILLINGTON:  So we're really honored andpleased to have you.  But as a public personality, howdo you feel--this is a very non-technical question, buta rather essential one, perhaps second only to fundingand perhaps even more important--how does one, someonewho's been extraordinary successful in relating to thebroader public and yet at the same time maintainingyour own very high standards, how does an issue likethis get across to the public?  I mean the publicwatches television, but I've never seen an announcementon television saying could you help; we have phone-a-thons for everything else.  Is there some way thattelevision itself could contribute to its ownpreservation?          MS. CARLISLE HART:  If you've been watchingtelevision, you will realize that not only would theynot be interested, they're not interested in decent,first-class programming.  I hope the press is here.  Ifind the whole television spectrum a disgrace and Ifind that my friends only watch news, one or twoprograms, WNET, CNN, and some of the cable things likehistory; but it has fallen into total disrepute and thestandard is so much lower than when I first came intotelevision, that it is a disgrace.          So to ask a television studio to evenunderstand what video, public or experimentaltelevision is, I don't know how you would get it acrossto them.  I despair.          DR. BILLINGTON:  But how then does onecommunicate about this to the general public?  Surelyit would be helpful in terms of the general, nationalconsciousness of television to have a little more fullknowledge of the richness and variety of what hasactually already been achieved, albeit small ways andin various peripheral ways to the main enterpriseperhaps.  But that would seem to be all the moreimportant for getting a broader range of the televisionexperience preserved and made public.  How does onedramatize the importance of that if television itselfcan't help?          MS. CARLISLE HART:  I agree.  I think that'sabsolutely true.  The only thing I can think of is somecable stations that might be more open to this kind ofsuggestion.  The networks certainly are not.  But cableis beginning to come into its own, as you know even CBSand NBC are going into cable and there will be stationsthat will be interested, I'm sure.  And one has to findthem, you have to--we have to go after that.  It's avery good idea.          Debbie, where are you?  Why don't you come uphere and tell us what you think?          MS. SILVERFINE:  I think I'm not invited tospeak today, but I will write them a statement.          MS. CARLISLE HART:  What do you think couldbe done to broaden the spectrum?          MS. SILVERFINE:  I'm Deborah Silverfine, I'mthe director of electronic media--          MS. CARLISLE HART:  I've explained.          MS. SILVERFINE:  --fine.  We will besubmitting some recommendations.  But if we do find anypartners who can make the plea, really do help us, andI think the work that American Movie Classics has doneabout raising the consciousness of the issues of filmpreservation are very helpful for the American public. And, they can be doing even more, talking about variousaspects like the role of sound in film, thedocumentary, etc.  And I think they might be one of ourpartners actually in bringing this consciousness to thefore about television history.          DR. BILLINGTON:  Who is they in this case?          MS. SILVERFINE:  They, meaning the cablestations that repackage earlier programming.  I agreewith Mrs. Hart that we need to look to our publictelevision stations and a number of the cable stations,and I think the networks might be more helpful ifcalled on the right way.  They will be importantpartners in this effort, because that's where peoplewatch television.          MR. MURPHY:  Speaking of the networks, we dohave to move on to the next panel.          MS. SILVERFINE:  They're up next.          MS. CARLISLE HART:  They're up next?  Oh,good, I'll stay and listen.          MR. MURPHY:  I want to thank you very  muchfor your statement.          MS. CARLISLE HART:  Thank you.          MR. MURPHY:  And please do stay and listen.          MS. CARLISLE HART:  I'm delighted to have hadthe chance to meet you all, and my friends again. Thank you.          MR. MURPHY:  Can the Broadcasters Panel Aplease take the witness table?          Good morning to everyone.  We'll start withMr. Singer from NBC.  Good morning, Stan.          MR. SINGER:  Good morning.  I have a briefstatement, just sort of a general overview.  I'll behappy to answer any questions on what we're doingafterwards.          MR. MURPHY:  Could you speak closer to themicrophone please?          MR. SINGER:  Yes, I will move it closer.          MR. MURPHY:  Thank you.          MR. SINGER:  I'm Stan Singer, I'm the managerof the NBC News Archives.  The NBC News Archives isresponsible for preservation of news film andvideotape, archival databases, film and tape librariesand warehouses worldwide for NBC News.  NBC News hasrelied on its archives as a support mechanism for over50 years.  What began as a way of keeping a collectionof major news events became a way to present broadcastsin a cost-efficient manner.  If one show shot an image,a second show was not required to send a camera crewout to record it again if the archives could turn aclean, well-preserved copy quickly.  Needless to say,our images are used every day, in every news show thatairs on NBC.  We also feel this great responsibilitytowards keeping the recorded history of this countryduring the second half of the 20th Century.          Additional attention has been focused on thecollection, heightened by the rise of the number of ouroutlets, including the NBC Super Channel in Europe andthe Microsoft joint venture.  Cable and the Internetare just two growth areas that could produce anunlimited number of access points for the consumer. The problem is there is not an equal amount ofprogramming to go with it; thus, the archives providesNBC with enormous flexibility to produce high-qualityprograms at a reasonable cost.  But this new world isalso fraught with perils for archives and I'll talkabout that in a second.          The NBC News Archives is currently involvedin a number of special projects to improve ourcollection.  We've spent two years designing a powerfulnew database that will allow NBC personnel to performsophisticated searches on the editorial content of thearchives via visual write-ups, transcripts, and keywords.  They will be able to view or hear digitizedportions of the collection and place electronic ordersfor the original material to our libraries andwarehouses around the globe.  We are designing a newfacility to allow better climate controlled storage forour film and tape, as well as offering us the abilityto separate duplicate copies of our broadcasts toprevent catastrophic loss.          For the past three years we've beentransferring our oldest tape formats.  Our two-inchtapes will be completely transferred to an analog anddigital copy by the end of the year.  Shortly we willbegin the enormous task of transferring our 3/4-inchcassettes.  The reason why these are the first on ourlist of preservation items are two-fold.  The two-inchtape, though generally of good quality, will no longerhave the hardware to play back in a very short amountof time.  While there is an abundance of 3/4-inchhardware, these tapes have shown the most dramaticdecay of any portion of our collection.  Jimmy Carterand Ronald Reagan are rapidly fading.  This does notmean that other tape formats are much better; allvideotape will require transfer in the not-too-distancefuture.  This will present, as the previous speakermentioned, an enormous crisis for the country and theworld if we broaden the scope to include all consumervideotape that's in everyone's possession.          The digital era may help all this and Icertainly will be the first to cheer when we leave thevideotape era.  But there's also this peril.  We arefeeling our way through the new mediums.  In theprocess, the focus has been on producing, notpreserving.  What will happen to all those web sites? What will be a cost-effective way of archiving cablechannels?  What will be compatible to what?  There aremany ideas as to what is digital and many hope thatcomputer and television meld together into one greatunified and standardized entity.          But there is also the chance that the climatethat produced the two-inch and the 3/4-inch videotapewill simply repeat itself.  During that period, the oldmedium film was being replaced by the first videotape,but that two-inch tape was too expensive and most wasrecorded over as a cost savings.  This is similar towhat we hear about high quality digital disks.  Thenother formats developed, some better than others, somethat failed rather quickly, just like what's happeningnow.  Libraries became splintered as different groupscontrolled their own formats.  Much was lost becauseproduction groups did not focus on preservation.  Muchwas lost when experimental formats were abandoned. Much was lost because hardware evolved.  All the while,new information came pouring in and new ways with evergreater volume.          All these scenarios are occurring today andit's important that the Library take a leadership role. For you to set the standards of how best to preserveall tape formats and to keep a storehouse of thehardware, as well as the cassettes.  Beyond this, theLibrary must anticipate the results of this nextrevolution and try to assist in setting guidelines forretention of all that is being produced in non-traditional ways, with multiple digital hardware andsoftware formats, and to work towards a unified digitalformat, and to best determine how to save all the 24-hour per day streams of information.          We will face this at NBC and then much more,and we look forward to working with the Library andothers in the field in sharing our experience.          MR. MURPHY:  Thank you.  Mr. Lang?          MR. LANG:  Thank you.   In June of 1993, thesenior corporate management of ABC gave itsenthusiastic support to a project intended to ensurethat the network's vast archive of own video materialwould be preserved.  In the over two and a half years--          MR. MURPHY:  Closer to the microphone please?          MR. LANG:  In the over two and a half yearssince then, representatives from ABC News, Sports,Entertainment and broadcast operations and engineering,have worked together to build the foundation of whateventually will be a unified network film and tapearchive carefully houses, properly maintained, andconsistently indexed.  The magnitude of this task isdaunting.  ABC now holds approximately one millionseparate reels and cassettes of network-owned material,most but not all of it news footage.          At the time we began contemplating thecreation of a unified archive, these massive holdingshad long been balkanized into different collections,located in different places, operated by differentdivisions or departments, catalogued in different waysand to different standards, and stored with differentlevels of care.  Even worse, we soon realized that someunknown percentage of this material was in danger ofbeing lost.           For example, during preparation for aretrospective Barbara Walters special, a number offield tapes were retrieved from storage for viewing aspossible source material.  Damage caused by adhesivesonce used in the assembly of reels was discovered onone important interview tape; other two-inch and evennewer one-inch reels were found to be dirty, brittleand flaking; and there was mysterious warping damagethat caused tracking problems on an interview tape thatwas only seven years old.  It soon became obvious thatno easy fix for this problem would be forthcoming. Even with all our resources, we could find notechnological Heracles capable of quickly cleansingthese, our video Augean stables.           Instead, ABC Broadcast Operations andEngineering, the technical arm of the network,proceeded to design and construct the ABC MediaConservation Facility (the MCF) which is exclusivelydedicated to the on-going process of preserving thenetwork's videotape assets.  Attached to our writtensubmission is a description of the MCF prepared byDavid Chilson, the engineer who designed it.  But Iwould like to briefly discuss in general terms both thefacility and the way it works.           The physical space, approximately 2,000square feet, is divided into two basic functionalareas:  one for screening and the other for dubbing. The screening area, which is not yet operational, willbe where representatives from ABC News, Sports andEntertainment preview, when appropriate, endangeredtapes in order to determine whether any of the existingmaterial need not be dubbed to fresh stock.  Forexample, unlike film, videotape cameras are oftenrolling several minutes before a newsmaker arrives atthe podium or in the doorway, and sometimes reportersdoing "stand-uppers" don't get it "right" the firsttime.  When multiplied by the myriad of news fieldcassettes in the ABC inventory, excising repetitiveshots of unoccupied podia or pre-occupied reporters mayin the end save thousands of hours of dubbing time,which translates into hundreds of thousands of dollarsin materials and labor costs.  The costs of raw stockalone is almost $100 an hour: $75 for D-2 and $25 forbeta oxide one hour cassettes.            In the dubbing area of the MCF, in order tosatisfy operating requirements as well as meet ourobligation to insure the long-term preservation ofvaluable material, two copies of each endangered tapeare being made:  an analog beta copy and a digital D-2copy.  Each fresh beta copy is returned to the shelvesof the working library from which it was plucked, andthe D-2 copy, the long-term archival storage copy, willbe placed in an appropriate facility either on or offthe company's premises, where it can quietly resideuntil another working copy is required.          During our initial planning process, allparties had agreed that the deteriorating copy, once ithad been dubbed afresh, could be discarded.  Even amildly skeptical observer, however, might easilyconclude that only the intense pressure of overflowingshelves will force this cleansing the deaccession tooccur.          Although D-2 is our initial choice of formatfor long-term archival storage, it almost certainlywon't be our last.  For the moment, at least,considering the massive quantity of material with whichwe have to deal, it meets our most pressing criteria;it's digital, it's reliable, and it isn't ridiculouslyexpensive.  As other options become viable, disk-basedmedia for example, we may move away from D-2.  Indeed,when disks become economically competitive with tape,the random access capability of the disk format, plusthe likelihood of a very extended shelf life, wouldcertainly make it an attractive successor format.           Unfortunately, with a perpetual archivingprocess that will involve changes in the selectedstorage medium, one of our most troublesome concerns ishow to ensure that we continue to possess and maintainthe technical equipment required to permit the playbackof electronically stored images.  Unlike printed paperwhich presents itself directly to the human eye, analogand digital signals are incomprehensible until playedback through an electronic mediating device thatconverts them into recognizable pictures and sound.  Asformats evolve, the greater risk lies not in theeventual deterioration of properly stored archivalmedia, but in the probable unavailability of theequipment, including spare parts, needed to play thestuff back.          Like Proteus, formats and media will continueto change.  But great caution should be exercisedbefore scrapping one established archival storagemedium and substituting another.  Considering thevolume of material with which we must deal, thepossibility of reconverting all previously archivedmaterial to each successor medium to maintain some neatconsistency and eliminate the need for more than onesort of playback device, would be both impractical anduneconomic.          For entities like ABC, with several hundredthousand hours of material on hand, the desire toachieve preservation at a reasonable cost is obvious. We must, therefore, seriously consider the possible useof compression.  Compression technology would permit aradical reduction in the amount of both the storagemedium required and the space in which to house it. The issue of whether it is archivally responsible tocompress video material is, we understand, a highlycharged one.  Some opponents of compression pronounceit anathema, maintaining that to use it is toneedlessly throw away a percentage of the materialwhich we are committed to save.          But what is the material to be preserved?  Isit the analog magnetic signal, or in the case ofdigital formats all those ones and zeros resting on thetape?  Or is it instead the pictures and sound whichare created when these invisible elements are processedby an electronic mediating device?  If what we mean tosave are the images and sounds, and if they can becreated, using less electronic information, to a degreevirtually undetectable by any human being, then we havepreserved everything of value.                    It is even possible to compress to a higherstandard than that of human comprehension.  Using so-called "lossless" compression, which is probablyslightly under two to one, image creation can occur toa degree that preserves levels of sharpness and colorwell beyond the capability of the human eye to discern. And the difference between an uncompressed image andone created at this low level of compression would bevirtually undetectable even to an electronic monitoringdevice.  In either case, the pictures and the soundswill have been saved--at a significant savings. Obviously, for material which may be used forproduction purposes involving much editing or otherelectronic manipulation, the less compression thebetter.  But for material which most likely will not besubjected to intensive processing, the notion of acompressed archival format should not be ruled out.          It would surely benefit ABC and the manyother public and private organizations who have decidedto preserve their respective videotape holdings, ifthese and similar issues could be discussed on somecontinuing basis.  A forum is called for in which ideasand information pertaining to the preservation ofvideotape records can be shared.  We certainly hopethat one outcome of these hearings will be periodicgatherings at which the archival problems, bothtechnical and conceptual, which we encounterindividually, can be discussed and perhaps even solvedtogether.  Thank you.          MR. MURPHY:  Thank you, Michael Lang.  JoelKanoff?          MR. KANOFF:  ABC News is a for-profitcommercial network news organization providing news andpublic affairs programming.  Although not widely seenat that time, the television network offered its firstnewscast in 1948.  This was followed in 1952 by aweekly program called All Star News, and in the fall of1953, eight months after ABC's merger with ParamountTheaters by Leonard Goldenson, ABC started a regularMonday through Friday news program anchored by veterannewsman John Daly.            ABC broke new ground in the fall of 1958 withthe introduction of early and late evening newsprogramming, and in the late '60s, ABC joined the othernetworks and increased its evening news program to 30minutes.  Barbara Walters became the first anchorwomanof a network evening news broadcast in 1976.  UnderRune Arlege's leadership, innovative programs wereintroduced, such as World News Tonight, 20-20, PrimeTime Live, This Week with David Brinkley, andNightline, the first regularly scheduled late-nightnewscast of its kind to use satellite technology tobring together leaders and experts for in-depthdiscussions on the top stories of the day.          Over the years, ABC News has built a uniqueand far-reaching news gathering organizationdomestically and throughout the world.  Currently amongother capitals there are bureaus in Beijing, London,Moscow, Paris, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo.          As you may well imagine, preservation offootage from past events and programming is of greatimportance in a television network news universe. While the majority of footage used is certainly newlyshot, each show contains archival footage.  In atypical World News Tonight edition, almost every spotcontains older footage used to put a fine point on asubject, supply background, develop its history, orjust remind us of the continuity of our way ofgovernment or of life itself.          ABC News will continue to collect the widevariety of materials that reflect U.S. andinternational news events, history and cultural trends,religion, science and technology, environment andwildlife.  Our preservations efforts extend to footageof events of every day society and every level ofmagnitude.  Footage of people from the most famous tothe obscure, the entire range of human socialactivities, flora and fauna from everywhere, landscapesand even still lifes of objects.  That is to saybesides news, the collection includes a great deal ofgeneric footage, children in schools, people working infactories, ships and airplanes, beauty shots, aerials,all of which can be reused in a wide variety ofstories.            Our core collection consists of approximately850,000 units of film and tape dating to 1960.  Another60,000 tapes and kinescopes are off-air records ofprograms, current programs, as well as all butforgotten programs such as Scope, Directions, ABCReports, The Reasoner Report, and Now.  The corecollection is film-based through 1975, mostly 16mmcolor reversal.  Mixed film and eumatic through thelate '70s, eumatic until 1986, and beta cam to thepresent.  Roughly 12 per cent of the core collection isfilm; about 47 per cent of the collection is beta cam;the rest 3/4-inch.  That is the core news collectionused by all programs for production.  We also have manymillions of feet of film and many thousands of videocassettes in storage.  These are trends and productionelements for documentaries and magazine segments.  Thefurther use of these production elements is morerestricted, so they do not circulate freely.          Roughly speaking, we save over 4,000 tapes amonth, about 5,000 in a political year such as thisone.  No, we don't save everything, there just isn'tspace.  We immediately recycle a roll with acorrespondent's stand-ups, since we don't feel it'simportant to save rehearsals for the final take, whichis of course preserved on the air history anyway.  Werecycle graphic builds and multiple camera set-ups ofminor importance to the event recorded.  But, withregard to subject matter, because we try no to prejudgeand therefore not to dictate what will be important toproducers in the future, we tend to err on the side ofinclusivity.           By necessity, however, we do have to makesome difficult choices.  Moreover, one shot may servefor dozens of diverse future production requirements,provided that the computerized description issufficient for it to be located objectively.  Keepingthese issues in mind, library staff carefully evaluatematerials turned in by producers and camera crews atall our bureaus and decide what materials topermanently archive or to recycle.          News production demands swift, accurateaccess of archive materials.  However, the richness ofthe videotape recording greatly reduces theeffectiveness of standard archival cataloguing methods. Key words and brief subject classifications at best donot do justice to, and at worst misstate and distortthe moving image.  For that reason, an extensiveaccount of the visual an auditory contents of therecording is necessary.  Producers, researchers andwriters at ABC News rely on their ability to quicklyget a functional, verbal likeness of the recorded imagefrom our computer system.  In proposing retrievalrequests to the system, these users may cast their netas narrowly or as broadly as they like.  They may callup specific documents or thousands of documents,although they may not request thousands of tapes.          Unlike the comparatively more relaxedresearch done by documentary filmmakers, the televisionnews producer is forever working against the tightestof deadlines to get the footage cut into that evening'sbroadcast.  Full text retrieval is practicallyworthless without the hand of the diligent cataloguer. In the ABC News idiom, cataloging refers to thedescriptive shot listing of the footage.  The contentfield of a typical 20-minute field recording can go onfor pages, depending on the substantive density of thefootage.  In this scenario, catalogers must askthemselves among the many things I see and hear, whatis important to describe here?  Also, how might thismaterial be utilized again and within the guidelines ofthe classification method, the style sheet and theestablished lexical thesaurus, how will an army ofdifferent producers seek to access it?   That is, whatdescriptive language will they use?          Cataloguing is a lengthy and continuingprocess an the focus and dedication required enjoins usfrom being as comprehensive as we would like.  Atpresent we are able to fully shotlist on a percentageof the new footage we acquire.  Decisions must be madeas the potential usefulness of the work and ultimatelythe significance of the story.  Remember, everythingdoes get a record in the computer, but only the topstories are catalogued.  Nevertheless, cataloguingbrings in the clients.  In the news film tape world,the operative variant on "build it and they will come"is "describe it and they will use it."  It is axiomaticthat there is a direct proportional relationshipbetween the quantity and quality of catalogue detailand the use of particular tapes and film.          We have traditionally provided and continueto provide access to outside producers for the purposeof stock footage sales and research.  In 1989, itoccurred to us that what was lacking was a portableindex to our holdings.  This was in the dawn of CD Romtechnology and in that format we were able to providean excellent word-searchable index to our footage withretrieval software every bit as powerful as the Stairsapplication that runs on our mainframe.  We distributedthis to the outside source and sent many without costto libraries and information resources throughout theworld.  Still, CD Rom disks are out of date from themoment they are cut and we look to the Internet andWorldwide Web to provide the means to distributeinformation about our collection to outside stockfootage customers and to researchers in general.          Right now the entire CD Rom catalogue of newsfootage, available for licensing from ABC News VideoSource is available on FootageNet on the Web.  We havegreat hopes for the future of electronic data, and incoming years even retrieval of footage itself on theDesktop.  Unquestionably, the greatest benefit therewill be the provision of low-cost footage access toeducators at schools, universities, and non-profitorganizations throughout the country.          As I have said, the archive is a verymeaningful part of the production fabric.  In fact, thetelevision news moving image collection has maturedinto occupying a rather enviable status.  It is not bychance that now at the end of this century of themoving image and electronic communication, that thetelevision library has found new friends and loyalpartisans.  Having earlier learned the painful lessonthat you can't go out and reshoot history, the networksare now more respectful of these valuable corporateassets and resolute that they endure.          Besides the historical significance of thisfootage, there is an economic consequence.  While theuse of library holdings has enabled shows to keep costsdown, entire program concepts like the 20th Centuryproject at ABC and documentaries that we produce forcable, have been developed around pre-existing footage. Cost center libraries have become profit centerlibraries.            Michael Lang has explained the MCF in detail,so I won't go into that, except to say that the newsdivision in general and the news film library inparticular, having a big stake in the success of theMedia Conservation Facility, participated in theplanning of the facility from the earliest stages andwe are confident that appropriate, careful proceduresare in place for the preservation in logical stages ofthe footage in our charge.          However, I should like to call your attentionto the fact that the preservation of footage in activeTV news archives commences well before the preservationdubbing takes place.  The term archive here tells onlyhalf the story.  The other half is best characterizedby the words circulating collection.  In this respect,we are also quite distinct from other types ofcirculating TV collections like entertainmentcollections because of the volume of circulation andthe extent of reuse.  At any one time, we have anaverage of close to 90,000 pieces in circulation, andmuch like a public library, when original materialscirculate off the library premises, they are at riskand we have to be concerned.  Circulating tapes meanstapes getting worn, damaged, or worst, lost.  Each runacross a recording head shave some of the magneticstratum off a tape.  Unlike published materials, muchof the footage we collect is irreplaceable.  It is truethat we are at the outset of technological changeswhich will obviate the term wear and tear; that is, theoptical disk for storage of master materials, as wellas the concept of actual physical circulation.   Thatis, images will be distributed electronically anddigitally.  Yet, for many years to come, we will becirculating our tape, there's so much of it.          So the point here is that we often can't waitfor the scheduled preservation project to complete itsgood work, for we will always be beleaguered by physicsas well as by the user who critically suffers amnesiawhen it comes time to remembering what he or she didwith a cassette.          MR. MURPHY:  Can you bring your statement toa conclusion?          MR. KANOFF:  Sure.          MR. MURPHY:  Thank you.          MR. KANOFF:  With the advent of the ABC News24-hour channel, the library is again taking a vanguardrole in expanding its operations and facilitating theuse of the footage it maintains in ever morechallenging ways.  A nexus of technological, culturaland business advantages now in evidence, including theInternet, HDTV, Interactivity, new digital videoformats, recent mergers, and an end of millenniumpublic that gives news a privileged place in every dayliving, makes this a time of extraordinary opportunityfor the television news collection.            At this juncture it is especially importantfor the Library of Congress, the National Archives andother government institutions to work more closely withthe network archives to sponsor specialized discussionsor conferences devoted to the problems of the TV newscollection in particular and to cooperatively establishcriteria for the on-going deposit of network newsmaterials.          MR. MURPHY:  Thank you, Joel.  Doug McKinney? I'm sorry, Donald DeCesare will go first?          MR. DE CESARE:  Thank you very much.  We sayDeCesare, by the way, although it defies linguisticpractice.          Good morning, and thank you for allowing meand my colleague from the CBS News Archives toparticipate in this important hearing.            First I ought to give you a little backgroundon myself.  I've just completed six years as theexecutive in charge of the archives; if not thebiggest, certainly one of the most respectedcollections of broadcast material in the world.  Whilenot a professional archivist myself, I've had to facemany of the same challenges that the professionals inour organization and these organizations representedhere have faced.  Beyond those, I had to plan thebudgets, get them approved, and spend the resultingfunds in accordance with sound business practices, aswell as sound preservation practices.            I've been a journalist for more than aquarter century now and it's been my great privilege tocover all the kinds of news stories that this world hasto offer, from sewer commission hearings, which is howI started, to wars, revolutions, political, cultural,social changes of all times.  And I've continued towork actively as a journalist even after I've enteredthe management ranks.  So, with that background, in1990 I was asked to take charge of the archives, forfine as they are, worthy as they are, vital I would sayto our work as they are, they had come under internalcriticism at the end of the last decade.  There werethose within the parent company at that time who weregiving some consideration, believe it or not, todisposing of the collection, both to the idea ofselling it off and also to the idea of having itmanaged by  outsiders on a royalty and fee basis.  Sowe faced then the most basic of all questions, Isuppose the one which brings us here today, why have acollection at all?          After some study and introspection weanswered that.  The archives are us.  Everything we doas a news organization, every event we cover, everypicture we take, every story we produce, everybroadcast we air, all are the bits in an ever-expandingmosaic of human design.  We are both the artisans andthe historians.  To do our work, we must turn in fullcircles over and over again, seeing where we were tosee where we are.          Once you recognize that news archives containeverything that happened before today, and tomorrowthey will contain today, you understand that thematerial there is uncontainably indispensable to yourdaily work.  Should you be without it, you would,literally, have no reference points.          While studying the archives, we learnedsomething else, something practical which helped uspersuade our company to keep the collection and toinvest in it.  We learned that nearly everything webroadcast includes archival material.  Were there to beno CBS News Archives, there could be no CBS News.  Evenour own company had begun to take for granted themillions and millions of images and sounds we werepreserving.  We had to say these are not artifacts,they are in constant use.          Our collection with very few exceptions holdseverything that CBS News has ever done; that whichwe've aired and that which we haven't, in every medium,in audio, film, tape, stills, scripts, transcripts,music, books, CD Roms, data cartridges, all of it.  Wecollect it, we index it, we store it, and we retrieveit.  It's a complicated and expensive enterprise, andthat's why people were very concerned about it back atthe end of the '80s.  As I said, we learned it'sessential, and that our company now fervently believes. And in so believing, the enterprise called the archivesthrives.          Well, we are, as you can guess from myremarks, our own biggest customers, using our materialover and over in more and more ways.  We program ourown network and now we help program others.  We licensematerial to the best-known documentarians like NET andthe BBC, and we license to independent documentariansas well.  We've expanded our business relationships toinclude feature film producers, corporate producers,educational producers, even the general public.  We'reso busy in fact and so much in need of ready access tothe material, that we are bringing it all back to NewYork.  All of our material, once scattered aboutvarious warehouses in this state and others, will onceagain be housed with us within the complex that we callthe CBS Broadcast Center.  Where a few years ago weconsidered selling the archives, now, selectively, weare buying others, so as to assist in the preservationof the irreplaceable images and sounds of our age.          So, are our problems behind us?  Well, manythankfully are, solved internally by the professionalsthat you see represented here, who are passionate aboutthose obligations.  But some new problems are emerging,ones which may well require a broader perspective thanfound within our own company.  Because our material issuch a treasury, it's very important that at least oneother repository, the National Archives, have asecondary collection of these jewels, as insuranceagainst some unthinkable catastrophe among us and as aservice to scholars and historians who cannot be well-served by us.  But should that be the only additionalcollection?  What if any obligation do we have tosupport collections elsewhere, such as in universities,presidential libraries, museums?  There are those, somein Congress I understand, who think that unauthorizedduplication and distribution of our material throughso-called clipping services should be considered fairuse.  There are those who think that such use isanything but fair, who think such services underminethe editorial integrity of the product, while at thesame time siphoning revenue which could help pay thehigh cost of building and maintaining the archives.          While we believe that all the rights to ourmaterial rest with us and always will, we are fullyaware that digitization will bring even moreduplication, making possible even more possession anddistribution outside the ordinary authorized channels. Inexorably, new ideas of ownership and new issues ofrights are evolving.  We want to help others understandthese, and in turn, we ourselves need help inunderstanding.           We can use public discussion of all of this,and so we are particularly grateful for the opportunityoffered by these hearings, and I can assure you that weare ready to do our part.  Thank you for the time andconsideration.  Let me ask Doug McKinney here, thedirector of the CBS News Archives, to provide some, aswe call it around CBS News, context and perspective, tothese remarks.          MR. McKINNEY:  It is with a combination ofsome relief and awe that we come before this panel, thenature of which has been imagined as a hope foreventuality now gladly arrived.  While many eloquentvoices are here to cry, we no longer face such a wilderness.          The preservation of entertainment programmingas it applies to CBS has been addressed by our othercounterparts at the Los Angeles hearing.  Here intandem with Mr. DeCesare I'll focus my remarks on thenature of the CBS News Archives, our efforts inpreservation, and end with a few suggestions addressingthe mission of this panel.          CBS has the largest collection of its kindamong the major networks, having kept and maintainedmore material generally in addition to having startedearlier. Dating principally from 1950 to the present,CBS News has well over one million video tapes,including original field cassettes as well as programbroadcasts, and several million feet of hard news filmas well as another 80,000 containers of film and tapemasters, prints, program negatives, and out-takematerial from long form documentaries and news magazineprograms.  All materials are now stored in Manhattan onapproximately 60,000 square feet of climate controlledspace and all nitrate film was transferred to safetystock some years ago, fortunately.          In addition, copies of the CBS Evening Newsfrom the mid-'70s to the present and of many other CBSNews broadcasts, including special and documentaryprograms, are on deposit at the National Archives, viaLibrary of Congress copyright registration. Significant donated collections of CBS News materialfor scholarly research and museum display are also partof the holdings of the Museum of Television and Radioand continually added to, and of the JFK and LBJPresidential Libraries, in particular.          We work with historians and researcherswherever feasible and license news material for use inas wide a variety of circumstances as there are uses ofreality based pictures and sounds.  For motion picturessuch as Forrest Gump and Apollo 13 to children's schoolreports.  In addition to the CBS Network and CBS News,archival programming can be seen regularly on sevennon-CBS cable networks.  And in addition to thepreservation of network produced material, we have alsobeen involved in the preservation of material producedby networked owned and operated stations, and to alesser degree other affiliates.          Our preservation priorities are in twoprincipal areas currently.  Two-inch videotape, ofapproximately 20,000 such tapes we have roughly 10,000left to re-master, currently to D-2 and beta SP;ironically the tapes themselves are in better conditionthan anyone might have predicted.  The urgency here isstated in the limited number of machines left to playthem on, but the equally dwindling number ofexperienced technicians who can operate the equipment. The idiosyncratic variables involved in successfularchival two-inch playback, and Jim will appreciatethis, include archaic skills such as knowing when,where and how to apply one's thumb to the tape path.          The other area of immediate technical concernis more straightforward but of equal necessity.  Three-quarter-inch eumatic cassettes from that format'sintroduction in the mid-'70s are reading the end oftheir lifespan now.  This is not particularly a problemof equipment or personnel, as the format is still usedwidely, but is an even greater problem due to volume. The good news, which I know can be and has been echoedby our colleagues at NBC and ABC is that a substitute,fully representative amount of national networktelevision news has been preserved to date.  The badnews is that a great deal yet needs to be done,particularly at the local level, if we are to avoidlosing a significant portion of the means ofunderstanding our social, political and culturalidentity, which is what television news represents.          Some recommendations.  While the nationalnetwork's efforts are critical to our concerns here,more help an coordination of assistance is needed atthe local and regional levels.  Indeed therecommendations to follow might also apply to networktelevision preservation, but resources areunderstandably more limited at the local and regionallevels.  If the national news presents daily swatchesof the fabric of our lives, it is local news and allits particulars that often reveals the threads of thatfabric; and if the national news can appear as a crazyquilt in time, so too does local coverage provide thewarp and wolf, often literally as well as figuratively. But for the same reasons, a recording of thePresident's press conference may be only as significantas a tape of what Main Street in Memphis in March '96looked like, let alone of Oklahoma City in March of'95.           As it is a given that not even everythingworth savings will be preserved and the resources arefinite, criteria for preservation at any level arenecessary.  But in addition to standard considerationssuch as uniqueness and content significance, at leastone other condition should apply to local news materialinvoking some test of content variety.  This wouldserve to include what by nature would necessarilyappear mundane now, but whose representational valuewould increase with time.  In that sense, we haveoccasionally wished we had more of the backgroundmaterial of the past which was discarded for having noanticipated news value then, but which would haveuniquely representational value today.          It appears obvious that even a limitednationwide program would necessarily require acoordinating function.  To that end, we suggest thefoundation of a nationally directed office fortelevision and video preservation coordination. Adapting some of the mechanisms established for motionpicture preservation, such an office would (A) act as aclearing house for the identification of materials inneed of preservation, to avoid unnecessary duplicationof effort, to direct those with material to those whocould provide needed transfer services, or tocoordinate the combination of small amounts of materialmatched to facilities of great capacity.  Not everyonecan afford to build facilities for long-term storagenor do they need to.  (B), assist in the formation ofrelationships linking local independent stations orvideo producers with appropriate local or regionalinstitutions, successful programs exist as models. (C), administer and award preservation grants and/orassist in coordinating the activities of preservationfunding sources, as well as preservation loans, to berepaid from proceeds of subsequent exploitation byrights holders.  (D), help find homes for found,donated or other such materials.  This could includelinking rights-holders with found materials or enablingthe preservation of materials in private hands withoutcompromising the ownership or the permitted orotherwise legitimate use of such materials, forinstance, home movies as well as quote unquote losttelevision shows.  (E), publish and/or otherwisepublicize a humanly comprehensive explanation ofcopyright rules and guidelines for appropriate behaviorwith respect to such rules.  Realizing that this initself could take years or prove impossible givenexpected changes in adaptations in light of developingdigital applications, it is not, however, facetious,for it does need to be more widely recognized that wereit not for copyright protection, little of what we'reconcerned with preserving would exist now.  Finally,establish a web site for information exchange.  Andhaving scratched that surface, the issues of accesswill require similar means of address and cooperativecoordination, but accessibility will improve in tandemwith preservation an will indeed foster furtherpreservation.           But for the moment, preservation must precedeaccess, and although this is a television hearing, wedon't have television facilities; Bill, I did bring aclip, but overall the idea is to enable futuregenerations to see this, a clip of last night's eveningnews, just as we are now able to see this, a clip ofthe evening news from 1949.  Thank you.          MR. MURPHY:  Thank you, Doug.            MR. FRANCIS:  This is maybe a rather ramblingquestion, but it's trying to summarize what we've heardthis morning.  It seems to me that as far as nationalnews is concerned, both transmitted stories andmaterial which is not transmitted, there is acommitment from all of you to preserve it for thefuture.            I also heard one of you say that you felt itwas also important to have another copy of allpreserved material available in a national institution. I believe that is an important point, and I hope therewill be some way, now that there are so many newmethods of dissemination (Internet, cable, etc.) thatall of you might feel this was a useful backupconsidering all the money that you've put intopreservation.  I was very pleased to hear thatmentioned.          But the one problem that's left is not apreservation problem, but an access problem.  I wouldexpect that you would all find it impossible to provideindividual access for scholarly purposes to thematerials that you hold.  I'm really trying to think ofa way around this and one possible route (because Iunderstand that it's absolutely essential that youcontrol the material) would be to make a copy off-airwith time code invision.  This could be done by anorganization like the Library of Congress, which couldbecome an access center for scholarly research.   Thematerial would be secure, because it is a spoiled copy.          I don't know whether this is something you'reprepared to talk about or consider, but it seems thatfrom our perspective we have to find some way of makingavailable this sort of material for scholarly usewithout putting that burden on you.  And I don't knowwhether anyone has a comment about that.          MR. DE CESARE:  May I give it a try, sir?          MR. FRANCIS:  Yes.          MR. DE CESARE:  I'm the fellow who mentionedthe National Archives, so I'll give it a start.  Andthat's something we're very much committed to, we thinkit's very important, it's a part of our responsibilityto the general public in what we have produced.          There's also a practical consideration in allcandor, and that is the scholars that you mention.  Wedo not have the facilities nor do we anticipate havingthe facilities for daily scholarship kinds of work.  Wehave often been asked to provide this kind of facility,but it's a very expensive undertaking.  I don't supposeI have to tell you that scholars are not in a positionto pay the kinds of commercial rates that commercialproducers pay and it presents a very big problem forus.          What we have tried to do and what we'rewrestling with, and why I particularly mention thecopyright and rights issues, is by allowing thematerial to go beyond ourselves and beyond the NationalArchives, for example, to the various museums that welend material to or even give copies to, starts a chainof events that as they then looking for sources offunding seek to lend it themselves.  And this is a bigproblem that we're having right now with a particulararchive, a very respected institution, but one whichseeking funds for its own preservation purposes is nowcommercially lending our own material.  That issomething that we have to wrestle with.  Where do westop the sense of responsibility to the nation andwhere do we start some irresponsibility to ourselves? Unfortunately I don't have the answer to that, but it'sone which we are wrestling with.          DR. BILLINGTON:  Well, let me pursue that alittle, because it seems to me that's a very crucialquestion.  It seems to me that this is a very periloussituation we're hearing described, because forperfectly understandable and sensible commercial andproduction reasons, you're all preserving much morethan you used to and you're much more conscious of it.          However, your concerns are necessarily andproperly essentially commercial and survival, you'reall competing against each other and against otherpeople.  So you've got very important assets which yousensibly are trying to recycle and use.            There is a very distinct public interest inall of this which you all also recognize and it floatsin and out of your presentations.  But it's not clearlyfocused and it isn't clearly focused as they say in thepublic sector either, so it's very confusing.  I meaneach one of you have your archives basically in adifferent institution for instance, just for starters. All of those institutions are under financial pressuresalso.  So the kind of situation you're mentioning issomething that's going to increase.  You're underfinancial pressures, the public institutions are underfinancial pressures, and I see an enormous messemerging with a great deal of institutional confusionon all sides, unless something is done to clearlyestablish and clearly fund the public interest part ofthis, so that the fire wall is built up and it's keptdistinct and people are able to think seriously andclearly instead of a muddle-headed way, where half ofthe consideration is their own financial concerns,which we all have, and half of it is very genuine,public concern, which we all also feel.  We're allpatriotic Americans and we all are concerned that ourchildren be able to figure out all the confusions we'vegone through in the second half of the 20th Century,most of which involves television, as well as thecreativity and the successes, so forth.  But that hasto be done.          Now what I'm suggesting is should there besome distinct national institution, maybe apart fromthe Library of Congress, apart from the Archives,something set up specially, totally funded by thetelevision industry, but totally devoted to the publicpart of this and established with a fire wall so thatit doesn't get mixed up in the promotion of television,but is solely devoted to the preservation of it as apublic records for the United States, and maybe thatshould be all-together different, maybe it should bepart of an existing institution.  But it's sufficientlyimportant, and I don't hear out of this discussion howit's going to emerge, and plotting the dotted lines,everybody's under financial pressure, and we're goingto end up in a situation where the public part of thisis done in a highly uneconomical way, with half a dozeninstitutions all struggling to do bits and pieces ofit, duplicating each other in an inefficient way.          Should there be some new institution--Ididn't come with this prepared speech in mind, but it'sprompted by the sincerity and the hopeful side of whatyou're saying, that on the commercial side there isconsiderable progress.  Can we build on that and getthe commercial people to get together and basicallyfund a central, national preservation facility andinstitution?  Is that a practical idea or is thatsomething you would never agree on?          MR. McKINNEY:  If I may?  There's a nay-senseaspect or a foundational aspect even in the televisionindustry with the Museum of Television and Radio tosome extent as a means, because I think there were twoissues involved in what you were saying, one of accessand one of public custodianship if you will, asdistinct from network custodianship or rights-holdersownership of its own material.          The Museum itself was founded by networkpeople, William Paley and the other networks--          DR. BILLINGTON:  It doesn't really do anyserious preservation, does it?  Well, boutiquepreservation.  It's not the same thing as seriousexecution--          MR. McKINNEY:  No, it doesn't.  But ratherthan duplicate the efforts, if the networks are goingto make the effort to preserve the materials initiallyon their own, then supplying the Museum with a means ofaccess as a study center, and one of the problems isthe scholarly aspect of research for it, although wecan easily now imagine a future not too far down theroad where you can put things on the phone lines if youwant access to see it, I mean that's quite a ways downthe road still in terms of a practical aspect.  Rightnow if you want to research television you have tophysically travel to two or three places.  That,however, is more than you used to be able to, now thatthe Museum has opened a branch in Los Angeles.  You canspend a couple of hours at the Museum in particular andwatch news or entertainment programming.          One of the beauties of it is that it is easyto copy on material these days and the means of accessphysically is much easier that it once was.  You don'tneed a projection room necessarily.  Those things aregoing to adapt.  But on the national side, if materialis already stored as a safety measure in the nationalarchives, then you don't necessarily have to duplicateeverything everywhere, nor do you have to make itnecessarily all the aspects of the collection in onecentral location.  But the Museum itself is all readyto some degree, to a large degree funded by theindustry as a--          DR. BILLINGTON:  But it isn't doing filmpreservation, that's my point--is it?  With all duerespect, I'm not saying what they're doing isn'timportant.          MR. FRANCIS:  The Museum of Film andTelevision is basically selecting programs that itfeels the public would like to have access to.  I thinkthat we're talking about something different.  We don'tknow what the scholar wants to see in advance, so weneed to keep a broader range of program materials.          I think there is an important role for theMuseum because it is taking what are acknowledged to beimportant programs and giving the public a chance tosee them.  However, I think that's a totally differentsort of operation than the Library of Congress isundertaking.  We are trying to make available as broada spectrum of material as possible not knowing whatpeople want to see and without making pre-judgmentsabout that material.  We get confused between these twoseparate roles.  The Museum satisfies one very wellindeed; but the other one, which is one that I thinkthe Library, the National Archives and other archivesare concerned about is not being satisfied.  I thinkthis is what Dr. Billington is addressing, this secondarea.          MR. McKINNEY:  A place to go and sit down andstudy television.          MR. FRANCIS:  You don't know what people aregoing to ask for until they come and ask for it, soyou've got to keep a broad range of things that areacknowledged to be important and things which could notbe defined in advance as being important enough to putin the Museum of Film and Television.          MR. MURPHY:  Joel?          MR. KANOFF:  Yes, without going intodifferent strata of interests in society for televisionprogramming, there is a difference between the public,I think as David is trying to say, and the scholar, thescholarly need for access.  And sometimes those thingsoverlap.  But I think if you go into the Museum ofTelevision and Radio, which is an excellentinstitution, on any particular day, especially on aweekend day, you will see a lot of the public who arereally just there to see old programs, sometimes in anostalgic way, but perhaps not in a scholarly way, andthat's what we're interested in.           I think the National Archives and the Libraryof Congress are really best suited to command and takeresponsibility for this type of operation, which wouldintend to give access to scholars and researchers whohave a real need to look back at news and other typesof programming.          DR. BILLINGTON:  Well, it's not onlyscholars, it's the record of America.  America is athrow-away society.  We have a responsibility topreserve these things.  The most importantbreakthrough, one of the most important breakthroughsin cancer research occurred recently--it's a veryinteresting story--because the Library of Congresspreserved the book that everybody else threw awaybecause they thought the guy was a quack when he wrotethe book.  Yes, today's quack, today's idiosyncraticproducer is tomorrow's genius.          Public institutions have an obligation topreserve--this is an enormously creative country and asthe holders of the copyright deposit of the UnitedStates, we're particularly conscious of that.  People,it's a very creative society, but everything is createdon perishable materials.  And to preserve the range andto preserve the kind of possible hunches of somethingthat may prove to be far more important in the 21stCentury than we can imagine now, that's ourresponsibility.  And the simple fact is there are notgoing to be the means to do it unless the commerciallysuccessful part of the industry supports the publicmemory.           It's not just for scholars.  It's for ourchildren and our children's children.  But the tendencytends to be to make archives, museums and institutionskind of shrines of contemporary taste rather thanpreservation of what tomorrow's needs might be. You've all given eloquent testimony to the extent towhich you yourselves are discovering how important yourhistorical legacy is.  I'm just trying to push it astep further and see if we can't get--and I'd like tojust throw it back if we have time for one morequestion, you said we ought to work together in thefuture.  I think there was a recognition of that verything in your own testimony.  Do you have any ideas? We had some good suggestions over here and at thebeginning of it, I wondered if you had any particularsuggestions as to how that might be possible?          MR. KANOFF:  Well first, I think to haveconferences among a group of limited participants,among the major networks and government institutions,to work out a project for the future which wouldinvolve providing for the preservation of the materialsprobably at government institutions, and for access tothose materials, I think that the networks have shownmany times in the past that they can work together forboth their own operational interests as well as for thepublic good.  And we tend to be in agreement when itcomes to the need for people to see what we've done inthe past.  We feel that our work over the past 30, 40years has been tremendously important and we realizethe need for others to make use of that materialintellectually.  We need to agree amongst ourselves andwith a large economically viable and stable institutionabout how that will happen.            So I think the first thing would be for us toget together in semi-formal meetings to do that.          MR. MURPHY:  Stan?          MR. SINGER:  I think we also have to think innon-traditional terms.  You're not going to get all800,000 copies of our cassettes.  It's just not goingto happen.  It's field material, it's material thatwe're just not going to be sending some place else.          But I think we need to think in terms ofwell, tonight's broadcast, should it not be grabbed insome automatic way of grabbing an HTML page, that grabsframes, that grabs closed-captioning and perhaps audio,that then can be distributed in a way that it's nottraditionally physical.  There is a cassette at yourdoorstep, that there is some national way of repositoryof this on-line data.  I think we have to--we're notgoing to go the path of cassette or film or that sortof thing.  It's just not--I don't think it's feasible. We're making every plan to preserve it, but to then saylet's build another 10 million cassette facility, itseems extraordinary I think.  But there is greatpotential and maybe we're not quite there, butcertainly the technology is there to say I caninstantly grab tonight's nightly news and give you 250still representations plus the closed-captioningwrapped around it within an audio viewer today.  Andthis could happen with all the networks, and I think wehave to look towards that road and come up with someway that that works.  That really is just a black boxat the end of the production schedule.          MR. MURPHY:  I'm afraid we've fallen behindschedule.  I'd like to thank this panel and ask that wetake a break for ten minutes.  Please be back promptlyin ten minutes.  Thank you, panel.          (Recess.)          MR. MURPHY:  Welcome again.  We'd  like toget started with the rest of the proceeding and we'regoing to hear from our next witness, Mr. Jac Venza, whois the director of Cultural and Arts Programs for WNEThere in New York.  Mr. Venza?          MR. VENZA:  Is the audio all right?  Can onehear?          I'm going to be speaking primarily to thenature of what our company does and what we've created,since there's been so much time given to technology bypeople who know more about it than I do, and archivistswho do.          Public television is such a strange system initself that I think it might be useful for the recordto have some of the background how we work so you wouldknow where to find what.  Particularly since WNET, thecompany that I'm involved with and represent heretoday, is one with GBH in Boston, who you will behearing from shortly, who probably produce and provideabout 80 per cent of the programming to the nationalservice, to more than 250 stations around the country. They have access to the tapes when they're fed fromWashington and in many cases the rights extend for overthree years.  That's been the traditional until now. That means that copies for the reuse very often restwith the stations.  That means there are as many asseveral hundred copies of things in some random state,depending on the ability, the financial ability to tapeand to store things.          Our company, WNET, is licensed in New Jerseyand it serves the tristate area of New York and NewJersey, and it's probably the largest by audience sizeof all the public television stations.  It beganprogramming in 1962 as WNDT and it was dedicated toprogramming alternate kinds of materials that were notcovered by networking.  The subjects deal in the arts,history, nature, science, and public affairs.  But manyof these programs are co-productions with American,independent, and foreign broadcasters.  In some cases,WNET is the presenting station in America, licensing aprogram for a limited PBS distribution period, and thatmeans the use and the archival support of thoseprograms tends to be less than any others.          In 1969, the Corporation for PublicBroadcasting and PBS were formed, and in 1970, the 20-year-old pioneer National Educational Television, NET,was merged with New York's younger station, WNDT, andthe call letters changed to WNET.  So the ownership of20-years of Ford Foundation sponsored NET programs wentto WNET.  However, the NET archive of the earliestprograms went from their Ann Arbor storage anddistribution facilities to the new Washington, D.C.archive of PBS.  As I understand it, and you know moreabout it than I, I think those earliest programs arethe first ones to transfer their housing now to theLibrary of Congress.          I'd like to touch briefly on my other chiefproducing colleague, George Page, because his program,the highest rated weekly series, Nature, comes from hisdivision, which also produces other science programsand limited series; for example, The Brain, The Mind,Travels, and a series on childhood.  In almost allcases, these are international co-productions andshared ownership and specifically produced Americanversions of each series of programs.  In other words,the versioning you've seen in America may be a variedversion for our audiences on the same material in someother form that will exist in archives abroad, orperhaps with other distribution sources.          Once an air date is assigned, a tape masterof the PBS network version is stored at PBS and WNET. Traditionally the two copies, two master copies, aresent to PBS and one retained at WNET.            I am going to concentrate if I may on thearea that I know best, and that's really what I'vedevoted the last 30 years to and that's thepreservation of the arts through the media.  These haveincluded public television's first drama series, NET'sPlayhouse, and later Theater in America.  These seriesrecorded many of the works of the emerging non-profittheaters and their new playwrights, directors andactors.  They include the first television productionsof early plays of Sam Shepard, Edward Alby, WendyWasserstein, and more recently George Wolf.  Theyinclude the first television records of the theaterdebuts of Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline,and many others in their first years in the theater.          For 23 seasons under the Great Performancesumbrella, hundreds of dramatic works of Americanplaywrights and adaptions of American literature wereproduced, as well as the Metropolitan OperaProduction's Great Performance annually produced debutsof new American operas from regional companies inChicago, San Francisco, Dallas and Houston, just a fewmentioned.          We've created a whole video library ofAmerica's greatest composers, like Aaron Copeland,Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin,Richard Rodgers, Charles Ives, Julie Stein and MilesDavis.  We've already recorded many of the seminarworks of new composers like Philip Glass, John Adamsand Quentin Marsalis.            Two generations of Americans have alreadywatched the rise of great singers and musicians thatthey never would have known, being distanced bygeography or economics.  Examples: Jesse Norman,Beverly Sills, Yo-Yo Ma, Kathleen Battle, ThomasHampson, Itzhak Perlman, and of course, Placido Domingoand those other tenors, to name just a few.          But public television began at a criticaltime in the '60s when all forms of American dance werebursting with creativity.  I think that it'ssignificant we began to produce this kind ofprogramming at the time that the National Endowment ofthe Arts was formed.  At our station, I've personallybeen involved in the creation of nearly hundreds ofprograms of American dance.  Thankfully we've recordedthe prime time performing years of Suzanne Farrell, LotoliMcCarva, Peter Martins, Judith Jamison, Rudolf Nureyev,to name a few, who are no longer dancing.  There willbe no question about how harmless creativechoreographers wanted their dancers to move.  Forexample, George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, AlvinAiley, Jerome Robbins, Martha Graham and Paul Taylorwere  all key collaborators in translating their worksto television.          Most of the programs that I've referred tothusfar are performances, recorded in the studio, thetheater or concert hall, with the best video and audiotechnology at the time of production.  Film documentaryintroductions or transitions often surround theperformance, and in these cases the film is transferredto tape, so there is really no existing film master ofthat footage at all.  Because of the importance of someof these artists, we've donated the unused footage, thetrims, to a specialized archive, like the celebrateddance collection of the Lincoln Center Library, butthere have been few archives willing to take that sortof material in the form that we've been able todedicate it.          If we have a foreign production or a homevideo partner, one or more other versions of the masterwill be created, and these versions may vary in length,content, sound or graphics.  It means the archivistneeds a more detailed code to identify how manyversions exist, what are their differences, and whatcopy he has.  Because the high quality of fine musicrecording required for our various kinds of music,often these programs include a commercial audioarrangement of some kind, and so very much moreelaborate archive exists of the unmixed tracks andthey're usually retained by the distributor of therecord or the tapes.          Until recently, all single cameradocumentaries were shot and edited on 16mm film. However, we could seldom afford the cost of a filmmaster, since all the initial distribution required wastape.  In other words, most of the film--that's thebasis of many of our archives in the last 30 years onlyexist in the tape master--all the film is gone, therewas really no archive to support keeping it, at leastat our station.            Most often these documentaries involveseveral years of archival, visual research, from aseries of existing film, tape and graphic archives. Often the new filming involved elderly witnesses orexperts critical to the story.  Truly for theperforming and visual arts, these high qualitydocumentaries have a very different impact than anybook on the subject.  And in fact the research for thebooks for the scholars of the future will probably needaccess to these tapes; it's something you've given someattention, Mr. Francis.          Finally, I'd like to join with Kitty Carlisleto call attention to one of WNET's I think mostsignificant earlier activities, which was really thework that the New York State Council and the FordFoundation supported, the experimental laboratory,which was an effort to bring artists of manydisciplines to really have their first experience withthe idea of videotaping and what would happen to them.          I think probably, working in publictelevision, that's the good news.  The good news is thequality of what we created and how uniquely differentit was in intent, working in the non-commercial world,in terms of what we thought was value to bring to thepublic through the media of television.  The bad newsis that as we were financed as a non-commercialoperation and because we were so underfinanced, and wewere dealing with artists who also were supported byinstitutions who were non-profit, we joined together topay this most minimal rights possible contractually sowe could have the programs.  It meant that essentiallythe programs are now tied up in rights and ownership ina way that I think would be almost impossible to haveaccess to anyone except archival scholars until some ofthe new systems of distribution provide enough incomefor us to go back and fairly renegotiate with theartists, the ownership, for their use in these othernew markets.  I think that for that reason, anarchival--significant archival storage is going to beparticularly important of the materials that I've beendeveloping, because so many of them are tied up rightnow until that can be solved.            I'm not going to spend any time with videotechnology, because I care and know less about it thanall the gentlemen who just gave you a marvelous updateon what the technology is from the networks.          I think the other thing that you know moreabout than I do is finding a better way to deal withcataloguing.  I'm afraid that the longer we distancefrom the time of the programs, the ability to find thematerial you want--I'm thinking for example just in myexperience we've created three major series.  The firstpilot one was called A Time to Dance, later one calledU.S.A. Dance, and one called Dance in America.  When Iretire, I don't think there's anyone who will knowwhat's in them and how they differ, not just in timeand in technology, but I worry that we in publictelevision have not been financed in a way that'sproperly allowed the cataloging that's going to makeaccess to these possible in a significant way.          Finally, I'm concerned that having created aunique video record of American arts, ideas, history,nature and sciences, public television is far toofinancially vulnerable to salvage what it has created. That does not end on a very cheerful note, but sinceI'm addressing the people who have already taken onresponsibility of trying to protect that library, I'mopen to questions.          MR. MURPHY:  Thank you very much, Mr. Venza. We're going to move on to the next witness and we'llcome back to you with some questions and comments.          I'd like to ask the next witness to make astatement, Judy Crichton, who is the executive producerof The American Experience, WGBH-TV, also one of mymost favorite documentary series.  Very nice to see youthis morning.          MS. CRICHTON:  Thank you, and good morning,everybody.I should add to that that I'm here in part as a formerjournalist and I want to pick up on some things thatwere said by the representatives by the network.  Ialso am representing my colleagues at WGBH and amongthe work that is on-going is the Nova science series,the FRONTLINE series.  WGBH also some years backinitiated Vietnam:  A Television History, which is a13-part series.            WGBH has been in business now since 1955.  Wecome to you very much as Jac does, not with hisabsolutely beautiful performance work, but with asingular video library.  We are part of the on-goingproblem--we are a user of archival material and I wantto talk about that a little bit more, and we are alsoaware that we are generating archival material for thefuture.          I was very pleased, Dr. Billington, by yourremarks, because much of what I have been responsiblefor collecting over the years has not always had a veryobvious or immediate impact.  Yet, both in the showsthat we have done at The American Experience and atFRONTLINE in particular, we interview many extremelyimportant and well-known people.  But those people whoare most at the top of the news, there is usuallysingular collections of that material.  We have also,really in our own way, been social historians who havetalked to numbers of people toward the end of theirlife who saw a world very different from the one we areliving in now, and who leave quite remarkable evidenceof the lives that have gone before.          Because The American Experience is a publictelevision history series, we work with numbers ofacademic advisors and scholars who have helped us putthat material into some context.  In addition, whilethere isn't a day of our life that people are not inyour facilities at both the Library and the NationalArchives, and when you all closed down, our people werein total panic because of it.  We are enormouslygrateful to you for you work.          We also have prided ourselves on going beyondknown sources and in many cases expanding theparameters and the universe of archival material.  Wedo such things as advertise and set up 800 numbers.  Wecollect material from private libraries and collectionsand people's attics, and have kind of a rescueoperation of our own.          Looking back at the work of WGBH, which wenton the air in 1955, it is very clear to me as it is toall of you that what is important is not reallynecessarily the content of the interviews, but it issometimes what is not said or what is left out, or eventhe postures of people involved.  An example, WGBHproduced a series called Prospects of Mankind withEleanor Roosevelt when she was 75 years old.  It was aseries of interviews with international leaders.  V.K.Krishna Menton was the first guest.  There was anextraordinarily frosty and quite interesting interviewwith a young John Kennedy, who clearly Mrs. R had notaste for at all.  These tapes reveal a tremendousamount.  A student can begin to understand why peopleof my age and older were so fascinated with Mrs.Roosevelt, in part through the postures of differenceand the civility of the interviews, as much as thespecific content.  It becomes a historical artifact forthe next.          In 1964, WGBH did a lovely film with RobertFrost, wandering through the woods and fields aroundhis home.  I would argue that it is easy to protect hispoetry; but that we also need to protect the memory ofhis posture, the sound of his voice, the way heresponded to those fields, the comfort with which hepicked up an axe and chopped wood.  This is the gift offilm and this is the gift of television and that iswhat we are fighting to preserve.          Similarly, a few years later there was aseries called The Negro and The American Promise.  Dr.Kenneth Clark interviewed James Baldwin, Malcolm X,Martin Luther King.  There are young producers workingfor me today who are mining that material.  We in thepast few years did a film about Malcolm X.  Now we arevery lucky at WGBH because we do have storagefacilities and we have a superb media and archivalcenter of our own, and I'll come back to that and tellyou a little bit about it.  But these people who areworking with us know what it means to go back to thesematerials and how important they  are.  Our series ofVietnam, which was in 1983, which included politicalleaders from all sides of the conflict, Vietnamese,French, American, scholars as well, material fromobscure archival sources--that's material ofextraordinary value, and we understand full well thatwe cannot allow it to evaporate.          Where I'm concerned about what was saidearlier is that as a former television journalist, Iknow that the single most valuable material is often inthe out-takes, that the compression of time--yes,you'll have minutes of emptiness at a podium, but thatisn't what we're talking about.  We're talking aboutthe attitudes of people before they make publicannouncements.  They're asides, the things that stripaway the facade and let you begin to understand what isreal and what is contrived.          Similarly, in the kind of shows I do today,even though we try to be as responsible and thoughtfulas we know how, we're still a terribly extravagantmedia.  We interview extremely important people forlong periods of time.  The out material is as importantif not more important than what we put in the shows. We don't have the wisdom of hindsight.  Thirty yearsfrom now there are going to be scholars and historianswho say that what we selected was not really the nub orthe heart of the issue, no matter how hard we tried orwhat good advice we had.  We will look at thingsdifferently as we will look at that Vietnam seriesdifferently.  We look at it differently today.  Theouts and the material that substantiates how a film isproduced and what the filtering mechanism that thematerial was sifted through are extremely important.          WGBH has, as I mentioned a moment ago, amedia archive and preservation center and it has workedhard at raising money to support that center.  We are anon-profit institution and we eat what we earn.  But wehave now 6,000 hours of program masters, thousands ofboxes of out-take elements and documentation.  Werequire that independent producers who are commissionedby us turn back their material at the end of thatperiod of production and WGBH holds the copyright.          We have succeeded so far in preserving asmall quantity of that material.  Our archivist, MaryIde, is here with me this morning and a very consciousand serious effort is made to select what we considerthe most important material to preserve.  But again, Iknow how distorted that can be with time, that what onegeneration thinks is important may not be, half ageneration even from now.          I understand that it is not possible andprobably not wise to preserve every frame of video orfilm that has been shot.  But I really beg you,whatever selection process  you go through, and Iunderstand how vulnerable that is and some of theconsequences of doing that badly, that you try and dragwith you all the makings that went into that work,because if you think of television, simply in terms ofwhat has aired, I think you are only touching thesurface in terms of what it is you all want to achieve.          Now with a small bit of reservation, I wouldlike to close with one quite different subject on this,because I am very conscious, as an older producer, whatthe absence of historical material can mean and whatits impact can be.  And I want to tell you about onevery specific area in which I have struggled for manyyears, and the distortion of the image of ourselves asAmericans is very clear and obvious.  And that dealswith the whole business, the visual history of AfricanAmerican life in America, going back to the founding. There is information, general information on slavery,we all know that.  But it tends to be limited and ittends to be stereotyped.  We know about theagricultural workers but our youngsters don't knowabout the master builders or the cabinet makers.  Toofew know about the role of black soldiers who fought inthe American Revolution--Crispus Attucks, maybe ifyou're lucky.  Colonial images included scant numbersof black faces as you know and because those imagesweren't there, Americans have grown up with a distortedvision of the human landscape.          I have spent years of my life trying to teachyounger people how to get over those hurdles and alsotrying to understand myself how the hurdles got put upbeyond the obvious.  I'll leap to the end of this storyby saying that about six or seven years ago, I went toan older friend of mine who had been managing editor onthe Herald Tribune during World War II, and I said"Les, for god's sake, explain to me why I'm having sucha hard time finding images of black soldiers in Europein 1944.  They aren't existing in the large commercialarchives--why aren't they there?"  And Les had a verygood explanation.  He was the guy who got the pictureswhen they came over the desk and decided what would gointo the paper.  And he threw out images of black menbecause he thought his viewers--his readers were notparticularly interested.  And because he threw themout, they didn't make their way the way the othermaterial did into our general archives.  Similar thingshappened and I can be very specific on another occasionwith newsreels.  But the consequences was that 40 or 50years later, the commercial archives without thismaterial, people simply ignored the problem.  And thefact that men had served in the Revolution, in theCivil War, in the Spanish-American War, in all Americanwars, was lost because it was too difficult to get thematerials.          We have made at The American Experience asmall effort within our own limitations to findarchives that specialize in this material, specialholdings, family holdings.  We've gone to the blackcolleges and universities.  The Ford Foundation did astudy a few years back and these institutions are sounder-funded that those collections are very often inchaos.  So it is only the best funded producers and theones who are goaded and nagged to death who are comingup with an image of America that is reasonablyaccurate.  And as television becomes the repository forthese still materials, television then goes on toperpetuate the problem.          So I am very concerned that an era of thiskind not be made for the next generation.  I don't knowhat that era will be, I'm not wise enough to go out intime and look back and see what the elimination of awhole collection will do to us as a society.  But Iknow in this one instance it was genuinely wounding andthat it will be replicated if we don't protect whatwe're generating today.          MR. MURPHY:  Thank you very much.  Nowquestions and comments.  Let's start off with Jim.          MR. LINDNER:  In public television, myunderstanding is that very often you are contractingindependent producers.          MS. CRICHTON:  Correct.          MR. LINDNER:  And Mr. Venza, you hadmentioned that there is this issue whereby you havevery limited rights, you have rights to air for acertain amount of exposure.  And one question I have ishow do we, since these are independent producers, whatkind of suggestions might you have for us to preservethese materials after the airing is done and theseproducers in some cases vanish into the ether and it'sgone forever?          MS. CRICHTON:  Our problems are totallydifferent.          MR. LINDNER:  I was interested in that.  Theyseem to be.          MS. CRICHTON:  Go ahead.          MR. VENZA:  When I--I should explain that Ibegan in public television--in commercial television in1950.  I was there at the very beginning of everything. By the time the idea of a non-commercial systemexisted, I knew what there were among my friends in thearts who were never going to appear in commercialtelevision, there was no reason for them to.  It wasclearly defined that the ratings would be so low thatthe idea of putting them in the media was not there. And the great proof of it was the great CBS seriesOmnibus, which proved that a mind of musician couldtake the media, Leonard Bernstein's first efforts weredone on commercial television but the ratings were solow, that the Ford Foundation who sponsored this effortdecided not to do it.  That meant that when we startedin this country, we were so under-funded that we had tofind a way to generate sources financially so youwouldn't have to ask Balanchine--we took five yearstrying to get him to take television seriously afterhis experiences at commercial television, and then saybut you have to use half as many musicians and only afew of the girls.            So our job in public television was to findthe resources from philanthropy, from privatefoundations, from some corporate funding.  None ofthose sources in the first years demanded ownership,but it meant that we barely gathered enough money tomake the recording.  So we owe it now to go back.  Itmeans that your work no with PBS Library will guaranteethe future that some exists of the master.   I believeit's going to have to take a commercial resource,because I don't believe there's going to be a change ingovernment support looking at their attitude toward theNational Endowment of the Arts, humanities, or publictelevision, it's going to happen there.  But I dobelieve that the work that I've done will not spoil andI believe it's going to be up to you to guarantee thatwhen there is television on demand and there's enoughrational reason to go back and pay those rights, atleast there's a master that exists.            I'm going to take one minute more.  We hadyears to get Balanchine to work with us.  We had 10 or12 programs when he died.  When we tried to do thedocumentary, the masters, our own masters we got backfrom PBS were flaking.  Fortunately we had two or threemasters to generate a new master.  And since we do nothave at our station a fundraising archival thing in thecapital campaign,  I asked if they could put a sectioncalled archives, and husband and wife looking throughwhat they'd like to donate saw Dance in America,archive, $100,000.  They said we'd like to do this. And this one couple gave the money to reversion 71tapes.  I don't have the rights to them, but at leastwe have a new master.           That is really I think the role we have herebecause I think there will eventually be enoughcommercial resources to find ways to get those thingsin distribution.  I'm just worried that the masterwon't be there when that happens.          MR. MURPHY:  Mona, did you have a question?          MS. JIMENEZ:  Thank you very much for youcomments.  I've enjoyed this a lot and I've learned alot.          I come from the world of independent videomakers that produce and are screened often at museumsor in other venues outside of broadcast, but also onpublic television.  I'm just wondering, first of all interms of WNET's collection, is it stored on-site or isit stored off-site; and then the second part of thequestion for both of you is do you see any ways that wemight be able to collaborate between our worlds butalso from some of the other groups that we're hearingfrom in terms of the storage problem, you have astorage facility but I don't know if you have room forother things, just well, if we might be able to solvesome of those problems collaboratively?          MR. VENZA:  When we work with an independent,they at least are guaranteed that there are the mastersthat are sitting at our place.  But again, the abilityto use them in a new market would mean we would re-negotiate financially, so everyone would benefit.          The most important thing about what we'vedone is that until now, when you had your own materialin the station as they have at GBH, you at least haveaccess to look at it again and help sell it.  That'sone of the biggest problems.  We're not going to beable to make any interesting commercial movement in thenew avenues of delivery if you can't show anyone thematerial, and that's going to be a bigger problembecause getting access to something once it's in theLibrary of Congress is much harder to get than it waswhen it was at PBS.  So you will be creating a deeperhole for us to dig ourselves out of.          I used to be able to get a tape out of PBS ina day and a half; now I think your system of retrievalis months, at which point very often the personinterested in seeing it is long gone.  So that is goingto be one of the biggest problems in the future, thatyou don't create such a perfect archive that you haveto be a scholar with two years to work on the projectto have access to the material.          MS. JIMENEZ:  I'm actually in favor ofregional storage.            MR. VENZA:  But once something is on publictelevision that we presented, I think it's one otherbackup for the independent.          MS. CRICHTON:  The one thing you should knowis that we do now buy rights to the programs that wecommission.  Occasionally when we come in and acquirean already produced show, those rights are tied up; butour rights problems are not acute like Jac's becausewe're not using large orchestras and opera companies. So we do own those rights for the most part.          We also have, you should know, already set upa system whereby scholars do have access to ourmaterial, including the transcripts, including the outswhere possible.  It's very preliminary, but we havebegun that.          MR. MURPHY:  David?          MR. FRANCIS:  Perhaps I could just respond amoment to what Jac Venza said.  Our problem is thatmost of the material we've received so far from PBS isin the form of two-inch tapes.          MR. VENZA:  I'm aware of it.          MR. FRANCIS:  And pretty well all the moneythat we have available is at present going to copyingtwo-inch tapes.  You're expressing a concern for thepreservation of this material.  We want to insure thatit is preserved before we make it available.  Are yousuggesting that one should send back a two-inch tapebefore it's copied?            MR. VENZA:  No, no.          MR. FRANCIS:  We feel that would beirresponsible.          MR. VENZA:  What I'm suggesting is that we'reall subject to a government that supports our kind ofactivity so poorly as compared to other countries, thatyou just said the whole--the further you distanceyourself from material, because now we have thetechnological distancing.  In those years, people didnot have cassettes in the office.  It's amazing thecalls I'll get from people who simply said could yousend over a cassette of X, and I'll say to the agent,my dear, there wasn't a cassette in those years, it wasa two-inch tape.  That's the reason you never saw itagain, that's the reason you don't have it, the reasonthe actor doesn't have it.  It didn't exist.          It doesn't occur to people that there was aperiod in which you did not have anything except a two-inch machine to look at the master.  That's why I'msaying the earliest and what will soon becomehistorically the most important materials from theearly NET years, the early dance series that we did atGBH, is so pathetically out of date technology but someof the great artists are on that--          MR. FRANCIS:  Sure.          MR. VENZA:  --and the reason it's accessibleis because in those years no one knew about rights.  Nodancer never did.  So they bought the film rights andUniversity of Indiana has circulated dreadful filmcopies of those early primitive tapes at GBH andthey're in every university in America.  So the worstpossible thing we've ever done is circulated, becausethe rights were worked out at the top.  And that's whytoday, it's going to be easier, because very often wewill make a music program with a home video deal andthat means at least the public access libraries can buyit.  So it isn't just the financial benefit for myself,it means that any time I have a home video deal, atleast I know that when I'm not here, people will haveaccess to the material.          MR. FRANCIS:  Can I just say something aboutthe out-takes.  I think archives are always concernedabout accepting out-takes because so often they are notcatalogued, and they feel that once you get that farremoved from the original production data, you cannotidentify a lot of the material.  Therefore, you can'tsatisfactorily  make it available.          In both the cases you mention, out-takes wereidentified, so if they were given to a nationalarchive, it would be possible for the archive to makethem accessible.          MS. CRICHTON:  I think that our material forthe most part is.  I think it's sort of a requirementthat we impose at least on the producers I work with. But if you go back into the UCLA newsreel archives forinstance, it is true that you look through a great dealof junk.  But it is also true that if your eyes areeducated, you often find what is most important withinthat peripheral material.          I think that as we move towards learning howto collaborate with each other that it is an area wherestandards should be set out and not everybody is goingto mind those standards; but even if some of the moreserious producers and producing organizations do, we'revery far ahead.          MR. VENZA:  If we have time, I'd like toanswer that as well.It depends very, very much on the attitude of thecurator, and I'm going to give you two examples.  Yearsago we started the first dance activity.  I filmed awhole week of activity of Jose Limon, it was his verylate years, and he was still performing, teaching, andwe wanted those things.  We used only a few minutes ofit, and I had cans  and I didn't know what to do. Genevieve Oswald, at the Library of the PerformingArts, was an avid collector of anything.  I did nothave the money to even sink up the material, but I knewit was valuable and I called and said would she take itif I just gave a release, the material.  I know thatfor years knowing she shouldn't have done it, she tapedevery damn thing in the world off--we did not have therights to actually give things, because we didn't havethose rights.  A completely different version of thatin the same Library is the Theater Collection.          A few years ago, Joanne Woodward came to mewith the idea of doing something on the group theaterfor the American Masters series.  She said that she andPaul owed their acting style to an epoch of people andthose witnesses would be gone.  So we began to do oneprogram.  I couldn't stop the interviews--20 or 30people were interviewed, we had a boxcar full ofinterviews and still no one was doing the programs.  Sobefore we began to cut that program, there was thedecision to make should we make a dub master, and Isaid it's $10,000  more but it's so important, let's doit.  We made the program, a 90-minute program, while westill had all those hours and hours of people.           When I talked to Joanne this year she saidthat of the people we interviewed, only three are stillalive, and it sat in boxes because we could not sink itup because no one would accept it in that form.  Andfinally she and Paul, eight years later, just out oftheir own funds, gave the money to sink it up and giveit as a gift to the Library of the Performing Arts.            Now those are two cases.  I only have twocases where I had to financially find the support toput something in proper shape for the archive, and thatis going to be one of our problems, and we'll have ittogether since we all work in a non-profit world. We're going to have to find some philanthropic orgovernment support for a more civilized way to generatethe kind of recordings we need.  I think the out-takesin terms of my case are tragic.  Because we only had10, 15 minutes to do this, I just rattled off names. Each one of those names with it goes an extraordinarything that they did in public television.  That's verydifferent than what they did in the theater or concerthall.  And all of the bits and pieces will become verymuch more important.          MS. CRICHTON:  In news and public affairsthere is one thing that you ought to know, which isthat one reason that networks resist out-takes and insome ways I do too, is that they are easily abused. And interviews, particularly sensitive interviews orpolitical interviews, are an act of trust between theproducer and the person who is being interviewed.  Andyou have won the right to interview that person becausehe or she trusts that you will not distort thematerial.          I am not suggesting that I am arguing forout-takes to be used by other producers forundisciplined pastiche in some other form.  I amarguing that it be used as serious library materialthat can be studied and maybe in some cases you willfind a way of setting the same standards that wereinitiated at the outset.          MR. MURPHY:  We will take a break for lunchnow and try to be back around 1:30 for our next groupof panelists.  Thanks again for your testimony.          (Whereupon, the proceedings were adjourned,to reconvene later this same day.)           A F T E R N O O N   S E S S I O N          MR. MURPHY:  We are back.  We are very happyto see you again.  We'll proceed with the rest of thediscussion.          We're going to start this afternoon with twostatements concerning videotape technology, and we havetwo distinguished visitors.  The first is Dr. PeterAdelstein from the Image Permanence Institute, and alsorepresenting the chair of the ANSI Technical CommitteeIT9.  It is a pleasure to see you here again.  Dr.Adelstein.          DR. ADELSTEIN:  Thank you.  Is this mikeworking?          MR. MURPHY:  Yes.          DR. ADELSTEIN:  First of all, let me startoff by saying that I probably come from a differentperspective than most of the people that have beenbefore your panel.  I was trained in science and spentclose to 40 years with Eastman Kodak Company and thelast 10 with a non-profit research lab at the RochesterInstitute of Technology.  My field of interest has beenphysical properties of photographic film, gelatin, andmagnetic tape. That's the perspective which I ambringing to this panel.          For the last 25 years, I have been chair ofthe American National Standards Institute committee,which has as its scope the permanence of imagingmaterials.  So that's what I am going to be addressingthis afternoon.          Now the importance of standards is veryobvious when you are talking about the dimensions oflight bulbs and sockets or the width of magnetic tape. These are parameters that have to be standardized.  Butwhen you're talking about image permanence, this is notquite as obvious.  Why do you need standards withrespect to permanence?  There are a number of very goodreasons, and a lot of this is evident from the benefitthat standards have been to the preservation of thephotographic image, a field in which there has been agreat deal of standardization work over the last 30 to40 years.          One is that curators and archivists are notexpected to be experts in the behavior of materials andhow long they're going to last.  So they need to relyon people who spend their livelihood in theseparticular disciplines. The standards organizationserves as a means of getting people together withdifferent background and resolving differences ofopinion.           The whole field of permanence of materials isa very difficult one to obtain hard data.  You haveanecdotal information but that information is reallynot hard.  It is on materials which have existed for 25or 50 years, about which you know very little.  Youalso have poor knowledge about the storage conditionsand how they have been kept.  The other type ofinformation is by incubation, subjecting  materials tohigh temperature and high humidities.  There is alwaysthe danger that what you're doing at these acceleratedconditions does not reflect the real world.  And thereare many cases where we know it doesn't, although thereare many cases which we know it does.          So the standards committee is a group ofpeople who will resolve a lot of differences ofopinion.  And when we write documents, it's veryimportant to have people from different disciplines. For example, the pure scientist will tell you to keepeverything at absolute zero, while the archivist willtell you that's really not a very practical thing todo.  So you do have to reach some type of compromisebetween what is scientifically correct and what ispractical.          Standards have also been very useful in thephotographic field by improving the quality ofmaterials. Specifications have been written for bothphotographic materials and for the matte board whichyou use with photographic materials.  Once there is aspecification, manufacturers try to live up to it.  Sofor those reasons, standards are really very importantand in the United States they come under the aegis ofthe American National Standards Institute.            In 1989 a subcommittee was formed which dealswith the permanence of electronic imaging.  Up to thattime, nothing has been done in that particular field. We've been meeting twice a year for the past sevenyears.  The group is composed of the user community(like the Library of Congress), manufacturers, othergovernment agencies, and some independent labs.          Now when it comes to magnetics, there arereally two things that you have to be concerned aboutwith respect to permanence.  One is the inherentstability of the material itself and the second is howyou store and handle the material.  So there are twoimportant considerations.  This group first tried towrite a specification on how you tell a good magnetictape from a poor magnetic tape, or a poor magnetic tapefrom a very poor magnetic tape.  This is not an easytask.  Magnetic tape fails as a rule physically and itfails physically for two reasons.  Either because ofthe way it's handled or because binder degradationcauses it to be weak in certain physical properties. So that means that in a specification you need physicaltests.  Physical tests are required for the cohesion ofthe magnetic binder, for the adhesion of the binder tothe support, for the friction which can't be too highor too low, and tests to be sure the tape doesn't clogup heads and create drop-outs.  An alternate approachis to measure the degradation of the binder which is byreaction called hydrolysis and you can do that bychemical tests.          The ANSI subcommittee decided what physicalproperties were pertinent, and they agreed on testmethods for some of these, such as adhesion, friction,and hydrolysis.  But once you decide on the property,then you have to determine how you're going to measureit.  Every laboratory has a different procedure andsome are good and some are poor, and sometimes none ofthem are very good.  Once you get a test method, thenyou have to have some way in which you can acceleratethe stress you put on the material, because you're notinterested in determining what the properties ofmagnetic tape are as of today; you're interested indetermining what they're going to be like in 25 to 50years.          So there's two things you can do.  You caneither incubate the tape or you can make the test verysevere.  The next decision is to decide what is afailure--how much friction is too much or what kind ofdrop-outs can you tolerate.  This is furthercomplicated because drop-outs are very systemdependent, you're going to get drop-outs in somesystems which you're not going to get in others.  Soyou run into some very difficult technical problems.          A lot of work was done.  We had cooperationfrom three U.S. manufacturers.  However, we had zerocooperation from foreign manufacturers.  None of theJapanese were involved in our work, despite repeatedefforts to get them involved.  To make matters worse,in the past couple of years, the American manufacturershave ceased activity in this area.  So right now thereis not a critical mass in this subcommittee to finishthe work on preparing a tape specification.            I suspect the position of the Americanmanufacturers is that permanence is not a strong pointof magnetic tape.  The permanence of magnetic tape isnot a great plus, and manufacturers have to beconcerned with the bottom line.  You can't fault themfor that; if they don't take care of the bottom linethey're not going to stay in business.  Devoting theirscientific talent on this characteristic is not a wayof making money.  It's a good way of losing money.  Andso they have not put in the effort in recent years. Accordingly, activity in writing a specification formagnetic tape has ceased.  It's not a story you maylike to hear, but it is the fact.  In the Middle Ages,if a messenger brought bad news he was usually executedand I'm just very glad that we're living in the 20thCentury.          The other area which affects permanence verystrongly is its storage.  This is really what everybodywho has magnetic tape should pay very, very carefulattention to.  It's a lot cheaper in the long run tostore magnetic tape properly than to try to restore it. In this area, the ANSI subcommittee has been moresuccessful because we had a lot of input from theconsumers.  You don't need the complicated laboratoryfacilities to write a storage specification as you dofor a specification.  So a document on storage wasprepared, was valid and was passed.  We expect it to bepublished in 1996.  It specifies the temperature andhumidity conditions; the lower the temperature, thelonger the material is going to last.  Likewise, thelower the humidity the longer the material is going tolast, although there are limits to how low you go.  Ofcourse, the other problem which has been addressedalready in some of the testimony that I heard thismorning is that of the hardware and the format.  Somepeople were talking about obtaining tape cassettes whenall that they had available was obsolete two-inchtapes.  That is a major problem and it's a problemwhich isn't going to go away.  It's a problem whichalso exists in optical disk technology, I think even toa greater extent, because there you have software aswell as hardware and the field is changing very, veryrapidly.           The only answer to that is reformatting. People who have tape archives should keep tape atrecommended conditions, i.e. low temperatures, lowhumidities, and that will prolong the life of the tapeas long as practical.  The time will then come when itwill have to be recopied or be reformatted.            MR. MURPHY:  Thank you.  Peter Brothers, fromSPECS Brothers, Inc.          MR. BROTHERS:  SPECS Brothers.  Is this on?          MR. MURPHY:  Yes, it is.          MR. BROTHERS:  SPECS Brothers is a magnetictape decontamination/restoration facility.  Wespecialize in disaster recovery and the rejuvenation ofarchival tapes suffering from material breakdown.          Since 1983, we've been examining, testing,cleaning, repairing and restoring tapes that would notplay back at all or had signal retrieval problems.  Wealso, because of the fact that we do a lot of hands-onwork and focus on the physical restoration of tapeprior to playback have a slightly different andsomewhat unique perspective on video preservation.  Wedeal in the practical realities of video preservationand restoration on a daily basis and we've identified anumber of actions and biases that are fairly widespreadin the industry that we feel have very far-reachingeffects.            Initially there are two pre-conceptions oneencounters repeatedly that must be addressed if anycurrent video preservation initiative is to besuccessful.  The first is represented by the statement,"Print and film are physical media, but video is anelectronic medium."  We hear this opinion frequently atconferences.  While video  may be recorded, manipulatedand transmitted electronically, the medium on which theinformation actually exists is physical.  Withvideotape, the potential for preservation is greatlyenhanced by the fact that the signal itself is fairlyhard to destroy.  However, if the tape itself becomesso abused or degraded you can't retrieve the signal,the fact that the signal is fairly durable is somewhatacademic.          A perceptual bias exists throughout theindustry that disassociates the physical tape from theprogram or the image it contains and makes the tapevulnerable to mistreatment.  Humans are by naturevisually and task-oriented.  A videotape containingimages of President Nixon physically looks like a diskor a small plastic box.  It's physical appearancerecalls neither the president nor the many hours ofshooting and editing required to create the program. Experience shows that personnel do not intuitively makethe connection.  Once a program has been recorded orviewed, the tape itself becomes an object, divorcedfrom the image it contains and emotionally devoid ofvalue.          People get very excited by new machinery andthe images on a monitor.  People understandably don'tget excited by the physical tape which contains theimage.  One of the results of this is while personneland machinery are maintained in relatively clean,climate-controlled environments, there's a tendency tostick tapes away in whatever space an organization hasabsolutely no other use for.  I understand from anumber of the presentations here and from others I'vetalked to that there's work being done to correct this. There is still a problem in that many of the people whoare developing new archival facilities aren't alwaysthe people who are handling the tapes, and theperceptual problem exists throughout.          If people really did associate the physicaltape itself with the value of the program it contains,people would not be putting tapes in extremelyunsuitable environments.  Even when an organizationprovides climate-controlled storage such as people aredoing now, abuse is going to continue in other areas ofthe operations.  Simply consider the difference betweenthe care that's used in moving machinery around afacility and how people treat tape.  Machinery is movedvery gently and carefully, it's always put down rightside up.  Tapes are constantly stored improperly ontheir sides because it's convenient, and the mostcommon way of moving a tape is a swing of your arm anda distinct drop of anywhere between two inches to acouple of feet.  This treatment is obviously going tocause some severe problems.          The widespread unintentional abuse ofvideotape brings us to the second preconception we'dlike to address. That is the very commonly held feelingthat since videotape was not originally designed as along-term storage medium, a lot of recorded materialsare now decaying and there's really not much we can doabout it.          We handle large volumes of older tapes.  Theprimary reasons these tapes are sent to us forrestoration should not be attributed to design flaws orinherent material instability, but to the fact that thetapes have been subjected to extremely hostileenvironments under conditions we would not expect othermaterials to survive.  To date, the industry shouldreally consider itself lucky.  Whatever the initialdesign intent, most professional videotapes have beenfairly durable and are capable of surviving tremendousabuse before they're permanently destroyed.          From a physical viewpoint, we actuallyconsider magnetic tape a fairly good long-term storagemedium.  Research exists that indicates the lifeexpectancy of tape can be extended significantly.  Iftapes are properly handled and stored, they veryprobably will outlast the availability of the playbackmachinery that's necessary to retrieve the signal. Furthermore, a wide variety of restoration techniquesexist that can reduce the effects of aging thatotherwise render tapes unusable.     The premature aging we're seeing in videotapestoday is primarily caused by excessive exposure tostandard environmental factors, the same factors thatcause degradation and decay in most other products:dirt, moisture, and heat.  Dirt is all pervasive.  Verysmall amounts of debris in between the tape and theplayback head will interfere with signal retrieval. There is sufficient debris on every tape we haveexamined to cause some interference.            A perceptual problem occurs here also. People too often assume that to put tape in aprotective case is adequate.  None of the standardcases that are available protect tapes totally againsteither dirt or moisture.  If a tape is exposed to anyvariation in temperature, the air inside the caseexpands and contracts and sucks dust right down intothe case.  Every single tape, before it is transferredto a new format, should be cleaned or you will end uppermanently recording signal loss that is not inherentto the original.  This signal loss is caused by dirtand debris on the tape that could easily have beenremoved.            Basic cleaning is sufficient for removingparticulate matter.  There are commercial machines thatare built for this or people can build their own.  Mostof these machines use some sort of wiping tissue and aburnishing post or blade.  We would like to mentionhere that the tungsten carbide and the sapphire bladesused on most modern machines are not the same as therazor blades that gave cleaning machines a very badreputation many years ago, blades that were causingsubstantial damage to tapes.  We have not seen anyevidence whatsoever either from test results, from ourown extensive experience, or from anyone we've talkedto, that indicates the use of modern blades causesdamage to tape.          While damage to tapes from dust andcontamination is usually overlooked because it simplyisn't recognized even after a problem tape is put up onmachinery,  damage from water and moisture isfrequently identified.  Binder hydrolysis is both acommon and serious problem.  As well as the problemitself, one solution to this problem is widely known inthe industry. This is a procedure called baking thathas shown itself to be very effective in meltinghydrolysis residue causing it to be reabsorbed backinto the tape.  Baking often allows the tape to beplayed back if it is badly hydrolysed.            This is not a panacea.  Baking addresses onespecific problem.  We're constantly having people callus up, asking us to bake tapes when hydrolysis is notthe major problem.  Baking exposes a tape tosubstantial heat and it's well accepted that heat isnot good for tape.  This procedure is not somethingthat should be applied under many circumstances and canactually end up damaging the tape.           Temperature is an area where tapes arecommonly abused.  We have seen many circumstances wheretapes have been stored in rooms that human beings can'tenter without breaking out into a sweat; situationswhere there's absolutely no temperature controlwhatsoever.  It's very important to have fairly stricttemperature controls to preserve tape integrity.          On the other hand, rigid standards are notabsolutely necessary for all usage.  There are a greatvariety of conditions that are tolerable.  Theseconditions do not include situations where tapes areleft out on loading docks in the rain, put in roomsfull of dust and debris, or stored in basements thatflood all the time.  The tapes need to be taken out ofthese negative environments so that they will last fora reasonable amount of time.  If the tapes can't berestored or transferred at this point, at leastremoving them from these extremely negativeenvironments may allow for the opportunity that theymight be restored and transferred sometime in thefuture.          We have discussed the neglect tapes aresubjected to under normal circumstances because thedamage being done is not highly visible.  There isanother kind of neglect that frequently destroys tapebecause the damage actually is highly visible.  We dealwith a lot of disasters and disasters are very obvious. The damage is right there, it's very extreme and veryvisible.  Because it is so visible, people assume thatthe tapes are destroyed.  This is not generally thecase.  There are effective procedures available forreclaiming tapes that are in disasters.  Tapes dobecome somewhat more delicate when they're exposed toextreme contamination and extreme circumstances, sothey have to be handled very carefully but they usuallycan be saved.          A lot of the damage that is done to tapehappens over time.  If tapes that are in a disaster arehandled promptly, often the tape can be restored beforeit's permanently destroyed.  We have restored tapesthat have been under sewage and we've saved tapes wherethe cassette shells have melted onto the hubs and hadto be totally disassembled and the tape removed.  Tapesare routinely salvaged from these sorts ofcircumstances.  People should not assume that if acatastrophe does occur that they've lost their valuableprogramming.  Some materials may be lost, but the vastmajority of these materials can be restored.          The most common disaster that people run intois a flood situation.  To a large extent, once again,this is because of the way people treat the materials. In commercial buildings, if you store tape in abasement underneath the sewage lines and the waterlines, it's very likely that these items are going tobe damaged.  Additionally, there are a surprisingnumber of storage facilities that are on flood plains. This is not a particularly good place to store yourvery valuable materials.          Fire is less frequent, but it's a morevolatile threat to tape, simply because it combinesmore elements.  In fire scenarios, the tapes not onlyare exposed to heat, but they're exposed to atremendous amount of debris, to the water from firesuppression systems, and also to chemicals that areused in fire suppression.  One of the things that wewant to point out here is that after a fire, generally,services are called in to clean up the space, clean upthe carpets, and clean up the machinery.  Unfortunatelytapes are too often treated just like the carpets asopposed to the machinery.  Cleaning personnel areallowed to clean the tapes with water, ammonia anddetergents.  This is not a very good idea and can do alot more damage than the actual fire itself.      Inconclusion, we obviously feel that tape can be a verygood long-term storage medium, but we are concerned bythe manner in which the tapes are treated industrywide. Unfortunately we don't see any easy way to alter theprevailing attitudes.  Tapes simply don't look likeanything of value.  If you look at a picture andsomething starts to go wrong, you can visually seesomething happen.  Very seldom do you see anything withtapes.  So they will continue, unfortunately, to bedestroyed by benign neglect.  For decades we've hadfairly good general handling and storage guidelines. They have not been followed.  If they had beenfollowed, a lot of the problems we're running intotoday wouldn't be occurring.            Still, the current state of television andvideo preservation is surprisingly good.  Despite theneglect, large volumes of magnetic recordings areplayable.  The majority of the tapes that have alreadydeteriorated or have been damaged can be restored, andthere's still sufficient obsolete machinery around thecountry for virtually any tape format to be playedback.  If we don't initiate a comprehensive program atthis time, however, we're likely to encounter seriousproblems in the future.          If you've got a situation where a transistortechnology machine breaks down, it can usually be fixedfairly easily or the parts replaced.  Twenty years fromnow, that may not be so easy to do if you need aspecialized computer chip.  Additionally, you have asituation where to this point the obsolete formats havebeen fairly sturdy.  They have been able to stand up toa lot of abuse.  The new formats are thinner, smaller,and much more delicate.  They may not be able to standup to the same abuse.   The standards that are beingdeveloped, the storage conditions under which thingsshould be preserved, the handling of tapes, may wellbecome much more important.          We're already observing new patterns of decayin the new formulation of tapes, tapes such as D-1, D-2and Beta SP, that weren't present in the older formats,types of decay that really emphasize the need to treatthe tapes properly.  Two of the most common problemswe're running into we have labeled spot hydrolysis andaccelerated contact hydrolysis.  Spot hydrolysis iscaused by condensation.  When water from condensationgathers on the edge of a tape, underneath that spot ofwater the hydrolysis of the binder is very rapid.  Itbreaks the binder down and glues the edges of the tapetogether, leaving a crystalline residue.  If youattempt to play this tape back, the tape will rip.  Youcan't generally see this sort of damage because it'shappening inside the cassettes.  We're constantlyrunning into problems of condensation on cassettes.  Inthe past, condensation has not been a tremendousproblem except in playback.  If you let the tapes dryout before you played them, there usually was not anypermanent damage.  This may not be the case in thefuture.          The other problem, accelerated contacthydrolysis, is caused by the interaction of the tapebackcoat and the polished metal guideposts that arebeing used in the new cassette formats.  When exposedto moisture,  the metal post acts as a catalyst and thebackcoat of the tape breaks down very, very rapidly,gluing the tape to the metal guidepost.  Once again,this is happening inside the cassette and you may notsee it.  If you attempt to play the tape, there's avery good chance the tape will snap.  If the tape is ina disaster scenario, where it has been submerged inwater, the backcoat of the tape can be totallydestroyed within 24 hours by this sort of decay. Simple exposure to very moist conditions in the air orin storage, can cause tape failure within a couple ofweeks as opposed to the years or months that often arenecessary for serious hydrolysis in some of theobsolete and more sturdy formats that we've beendealing with up to this point.          These new patterns of decay highlight theneed for continuing research.  At this point, the datathat we need requires rather sophisticated equipmentthat is hard to find outside of government facilities. It would be very helpful if a government agency such asthe Library of Congress could collect suggestions fordata that is necessary, collate these suggestions, andpresent them to the government laboratories so that wecould get some of the data we need to deal with theproblems that we're encountering now and the newproblems that we will encounter in the future.          Finally, we'd like to make a plea concerningexperts in the field of video preservation andrestoration.  Expert advice is essential, but oneshould be prudent when applying or relying suchinformation.  Much of the information in the field thatis passed around is opinion and may not be supported bydata or experience.  Other information is garbled byrepetition and inaccurate.  Just like the oldchildren's game of Telephone, the message three or foursteps down the line bears little resemblance to theoriginal.          Conversely, experts should not attempt toinhibit the flow of information by hiding behind theterm proprietary.  Few techniques are really exclusiveto a single individual and most experts' real advantageis the length and breadth of their experience.  Whileone would not expect an expert to provide a completeblueprint of his methods, a brief explanation ofprocedures that are used and the theory behind them isessential, otherwise an organization has absolutely noidea what's being done with their material.  Quitesimply, people should ask questions and make certainthat they understand the answers that they're given.          In conclusion, we believe that communicationis the key to success.  We would not be having thesuccess with restoration that we are right now in ourfacility if we had not had access to a tremendousamount of research that has been done all over theworld, things that we are able to interpret,synthesize, and put together into practicalapplications.  We believe that all of the various areasmust be open in their communication and there must be agreat amount of cooperation for us to be successful. Thank you.          MR. MURPHY:  Thank you.  Questions?  Mona?          MS. JIMENEZ:  First, Dr. Adelstein, you weresaying that the three tape manufacturers had pulled outof the committee or pulled out of the work, and I'mjust wondering first of all who they were, if you'refree to say that?          DR. ADELSTEIN:  Yes.  IBM, 3M, the third oneescapes my memory.          MS. JIMENEZ:  Ampex is it?          DR. ADELSTEIN:  Beg your pardon?          MS. JIMENEZ:  Ampex?          DR. ADELSTEIN:  And Ampex.          MS. JIMENEZ:  And Ampex.  And then why wouldthe work cease, is it because you don't have tapeavailable or financial resources, or--	  DR. ADELSTEIN:  Well, what you need to write aspecification on properties are laboratory facilities. Unlike the specification for storage where you needpeople who have had experience in storage, and who havestorage facilities.  To write a specification you needsomeone who has, for example, a friction test.  Theycan incubate tape in ovens at different temperaturesand humidities and they are scientifically trained tobe able to interpret the data obtained on incubatedtape.  So you need scientists and you need thescientific apparatus.  The only people in this countrywho have the facilities are the manufacturers.          MS. JIMENEZ:  I see.  How much would it cost? We can't completely be stuck because the manufacturershave pulled out, we're in big trouble.  So we have tothink--          DR. ADELSTEIN:  I know this is a statementwhich I made several times and the reaction I get isvery similar to yours.  You don't like to hear what isbeing said and I don't blame you.          The only laboratory in the country which Ithink has facilities to do this is the National MediaLab, which is government-supported.  But theirfacilities are limited as well.  The only hope that Ireally see in preparing a tape specification is if wecould somehow write a specification which just measuresthe hydrolysis of the binder.  But that means you don'tget into some of the other characteristics, forinstance, adhesion.  And that may be possible with thehelp of the National Media Lab, but it's not a surething at all.  I have been in contact with the NationalMedia Lab just within the last month to see if we canmove that along.            I suspect that if we ever did write some typeof specification which just dealt with the chemistryand not the physical properties we've have an awful hueand cry on the part of the manufacturers.  But I don'thave a great deal of sympathy for them.          MS. JIMENEZ:  Thank you.          MR. MURPHY:  Jim?          MR. LINDNER:  This is for Mr. Adelstein aswell.  Again, getting back to this issue of standards. It seems that talking a little bit about equipment forthe moment, we've been talking mostly about tape, itseems that for lack of a better term there's been awholesale abandonment of a standards practice on thepart of equipment manufacturers.  It used to be thatbefore a format was introduced to the industry or toconsumers for that matter, it went through the Societyof Motion Picture and Television Engineers or someother process, and it seems that lately at least themanufacturers are intentionally introducing formatsthat are just slightly different for commercialadvantage.  The most recent example is Panasonic withtheir DVC format and Sony with their DV format.  Theyboth use virtually the same algorithms for compressionbut they use different tape that's different byliterally three millimeters, which is clearly nottrying to find a standard.          Is the same thing going on with equipmentstandards, I mean are manufacturers just forgettingabout standards and practices at all and they reallydon't care about standards and practices any more andthey're just doing it on their own?          DR. ADELSTEIN:  I can't really answer yourquestion very well because it's outside of my field,the equipment aspect.  Some people have suggested whydon't we just write a standard for playback equipment. In other words, standardize on a piece of equipmentthat tape should operate on.  In my opinion that's aridiculous suggestion. What they're saying is let'sstandardize technology the way it is today and thatmeans we're not going to have progress in the future. The manufacturers won't stand for it and wouldn'tlisten to it.  You just can't stop advances.            The manufacturers, of course, are out toadvance their product and to do that they want to makethings better and different.  So there is an economicreason why there should be differences betweenmanufacturers.          MR. LINDNER:  So you don't see there beingless formats at all, you see there being more formatsas time goes on?          DR. ADELSTEIN:  I can't make a prediction.  Idon't know.          MR. FRANCIS:  It's very pleasing that there'snow more information about tape preservation andhandling, but that in some ways is causing moreconfusion.  If you manage a large collection, basicallyyou're always concerned with the bottom line.  Let'sjust take two-inch as an example.  Obviously you havevarious choices.  You can try and preserve your tapelonger, but that means you have to keep your equipmentin good repair longer.          You have another alternative.  You use allthe money that you were going to spend on additionalstorage and on maintaining obsolete equipment now andcopy the tape onto a format which didn't have theequipment problems.          I see in the new standards, for instance,they're talking about the idea of recommending a muchlower humidity than previously.  But reading thestandards correspondence, it appears that if you have awide tape like two-inch, then it may have to spend upto 30 days or more in some sort of intermediatehumidity situation before you can withdraw it.            It's very useful to have a lot of theseissues on the table; but I haven't seen anything quitelike there is for film where you can see the advantagesof each of these alternatives.  You can compare thecost of longer storage with perhaps the cost ofmaintaining say two-inch equipment.  And it's not onlytwo-inch you need comparisons for, you need them forall formats, because some formats which are much morerecent have a very short life.               I wonder whether the Image PermanenceInstitute or any other organization is trying to chartthis information to make it easier for people who areactually managing collections, to decide where to spendtheir dollar?          DR. ADELSTEIN:  Yes.  Well, of course, yourwords warm the cockles of my heart, because you'rereferring of course to work that's been done at theImage Permanence Institute and which I know you're verywell aware in which the have come up with a concept ofa preservation index and  a preservation index monitor,PIM.  That was based on chemical changes inphotographic film base and how it's affected bytemperature and humidity.  You can take any environmentand come up with a number of how good it is which isgiven in years.  The same effects of temperature andhumidity also exist for dye stability as well.          We have got to realize that the photographicindustry is 100 years old, the tape industry is onlyhalf that old, and concern about permanence has onlybeen relatively recent.  The best papers have beenwritten about it early, about 15 to 20 years ago.  Sothe industry is not as mature as far as dealing withtape preservation.          I think you could probably get a type ofpreservation index just looking at the hydrolysis ofmagnetic tape.  That doesn't get around some of thedisadvantages that you have, for instance, of humidityconditioning your tape.  That isn't dealt with in thephotographic industry either.  If you go to lowtemperature storage, you have a price to pay and theprice is the warm-up time.  And of course it's a loteasier to warm it up than to humidify it up.          The 30 days humidification time that youreferred to I think was a little excessive and theindividual who actually suggested that has modified hisposition somewhat. The current thinking today is thatif you find that your tape, particularly helical scantape, isn't following the track that it should, that isyou don't get a good playback, then you probably have ahumidity problem.  The tape should then be humidifieduntil it does play right.  But 30 days is a littleexcessive I think.             With respect to the comment you  made aboutshould you put your money in preserving what you haveor should you copy now, I'm a firm believer inpreserving what you have.  If you copy now, you'regoing to be given the same problem in 20 years.  So whycopy every ten years when you can copy every 20 years?          MR. MURPHY:  Peter Brothers, from your workwith the physical property of tape, can you recommendany areas of further research that you think are neededto make your work easier and give us a greater sense ofcomfort about the future of videotape?          MR. BROTHERS:  Well, as Dr. Adelstein wasdiscussing, we need to know more about the hydrolysisprocess itself.  We have developed a procedure wherewe've been able to readhere loose oxide onto the basecoat.  We have supporting theory as to why it works,but we really need some quantitative data that we donot have the test equipment to provide.  Theoretically,it has to do with the hydrolysis process.  Again,theory indicates that to some degree the hydrolysisprocess can be reversed.  Unfortunately, there isinsufficient hard data on the reversal mechanism andhow long it takes.           A lot of restoration procedures involveexposing the material to extreme conditions and wedon't have enough data on how long or how extreme thoseconditions need to be and how much--how far the effecthas to go before the tape is playable.  For example, inthe situations where we're talking about the length oflife of a tape, models are often determined by anarbitrary percentage of hydrolysis product in thebinder.  But there isn't really enough hard data on howmuch hydrolysis product in the binder actuallyinterferes with playback.  Different models usedifferent levels.  There has not been enough testing.            There also is a lot of residue material thatis found on the surface of tapes.  There's calcium,there's sodium, there's breakdown from the lubricants,and there's the residue from the hydrolysis process inthe binder.  When talking to different people, they'lloften identify the residues as different things.  Itwould be very helpful to do more laboratory testing andreally find out just exactly what all of these residuesare and how frequently they appear.  The basicbreakdown of hydrolysis where the polymers break downinto low molecular weight, oligimers and carbolic acidis important, but there's obviously other breakdownoccurring.          Other decay has been so overshadowed by thehydrolysis problem that I don't believe that there'sbeen enough research done in this area and it could bevery important.  If we find a way to retard thehydrolysis breakdown of the tape, there may well beother decay that is going to show up as long-termproblems.  Problems that haven't shown up as well inaccelerated testing at this point.          DR. ADELSTEIN:  I think that another aspectthat should be mentioned.   Both Peter and I have beentalking about hydrolysis, but another aspect ofmagnetic tape permanence is the fact that we're dealingwith a very flimsy material.  To get greater andgreater compaction we're making it flimsier andflimsier.  So we take this flimsy  material and we runit through all kinds of complicated machinery, and runit over stationery heads, and we expect it to be verydurable.           So when you want greater compaction ofinformation on one hand, and greater durability in theother, then you're going at cross purposes.  They'renot compatible.  It's like having a water solubleraincoat.  There's a contradiction in terms.  And a lotof tape damage that Jim and Peter will testify to, isjust caused by the handling of the material.  Thishappens to a much lesser extent with optical disks andwith photographic film.  The more severe handling ofphotographic film is a motion picture film and that ismuch, much thicker.          MR. MURPHY:  Thank you very much for yourstatements and your willingness to answer ourquestions.  We'll take a 15-minute break.          (Recess.)          MR. MURPHY:  Can we have the representativesof the Archives and Museums come to the witness table?          The position of Public Archives and Museumsin the program has nothing to do with their importance. We had to juggle various calendars and this is just howit broke out.  We are going to go in the order listed,except that Robert Haller will be a little late, sowe'll start with Mr. Duane Watson, representing the NewYork Public Library.  Mr. Watson is the Aaron and ClaraGreenhut Rabinowitz Chief Librarian for Preservation.          MR. WATSON:  Good afternoon.           As you've just stated, I am the chieflibrarian for preservation at the New York PublicLibrary.  The New York Public Library is the world'slargest public library system consisting of 82 branchlibraries and four world-renowned research centers, theCenter for Humanities and Social Sciences, the Libraryfor the Performing Arts, the Schomburg Center forResearch in Black Culture, and our soon to be openedScience, Industry and Business Library at MadisonAvenue and 34th Street          The Library's preservation program, now inits 30th year, and involving more than 70 full-timestaff members, coordinates preservation services foreach of these library centers.  Each year, more than100,000 items from the collection, now surpassing 50million catalogued items, receive some kind ofpreservation treatment.          The Library commends the Library of Congressfor embarking on this study and providing nationalleadership in the field of American television andvideo preservation.  We are pleased that this studyincludes representation from a wide range oforganizations and individuals.  It is especiallyencouraging that the librarian is seeking informationon the preservation efforts and needs of the varioustypes of public institutions with video holdings. These measures, we believe, are essential if acomprehensive national television and videopreservation effort is to be established.  Thisincludes adequate funding, the development ofpreservation priorities, and the development ofnational standards.  We welcome the opportunity tocontribute to this study by sharing the New York PublicLibrary's experience with and concern about videopreservation both through this hearing and in the moredetailed survey which we are in the process ofcompleting.          The New York Public Library's video holdingsare often primary documents, unpublished and uniquerecordings of artists and their works.  They documentthe most significant artists and events of our time andcontain local and individual interpretation of peopleand events.  They are vitally important elements withinthe videotape preservation, which is now underconsideration.          Another area of immense importance both inquality and quantity are videotapes which werepublished but which are no longer available anywhereelse and which are not being preserved anywhere else. Together these two types of videotape "document" thepast 30 years in detailed ways which must be preservedfor future generations of study.  Without these tapes,significant and dynamic issues in our history will belost.           Videotape has become the "medium of choice"of the past two or three decades, particularly byartists and recorders of social and cultural life whofor the first time in history can obtain affordableequipment to record their own works and observations. This is especially true for dance and choreographicworks.  Also, educators and students have utilizedvideotape as a pivotal communication and teachingdevice for transmitting information on every subject. Consequently, the preservation of so important anaspect of American culture must be one of our nationalpriorities.          The documentation and dramatization of ourexperiences that were once exclusively captured on filmare increasingly being captured on videotape.  We musttake immediate steps to insure that this physicallyfragile medium is preserved or we will lose asubstantial part of the history of the last twodecades.            We live in an era of transition frominformation and artifacts in chemicals on paper toinformation in electronic forms.  As we undergo thistransition, the ultimate answers to preservation ofelectronic information and materials cannot be knownwith certainty.  Copying to the currently best formatis the option available while we await technologicalchanges which lead to longer permanence.  Because wewill be continuing this transition for many  years, wemust devise strategies to save as much videotape aspossible.  Funding for the transfer of videotapes to amore stable medium is desperately needed during thewait for an alternative preservation medium to arrive.           We see several concerns.  One is the type ofmaterials.  The scope and subject matter of thetelevision and video materials held by the variousdivisions of the New York Public Library and theprocedures followed for preserving and providing accessto them is varied.  However, the common concernsregarding television and video preservation haveencouraged cooperative efforts and assistance by thepreservation program.  Together we are preserving videofootage that would appear to fall outside the scope ofother institutions or individuals.           Some of these are productions that werecreated originally for television broadcast; others arenot fully edited or are productions that were notcreated for theatrical exhibition.  We feel that thesetypes of material merit preservation because of theirvalue to researchers and to the history of televisionand video.  Researchers and documentary videomakersrequire large volumes of raw footage from which toselect appropriate segments, just as filmmakers willshoot many more hours of footage than will ever maketheir final cut.  For these reasons, we would urge thatconcern be given not only to the preservation andrestoration of individual released titles, but also tocollections that contain released, unreleased and rawtelevision and video footage.           This is not to suggest the preservation ofanything and everything.  Given the costs, we recognizethe importance of being selective about what ispreserved.  The study of the current state of Americantelevision and video preservation provides a vitalopportunity for many institutions to share informationand express concern.          The hearings process also provides insightinto appropriate selections for preservation efforts;however, unreleased titles and raw footage held inresearch institutions must be included in any plandesigned to preserve the nation's television and videoheritage.  This material when viewed by futuregenerations will provide them with greater insightsinto the people and events of the past, and will be thebasis upon which future generations will rely for theirunderstanding and interpretation of our time.          Institutions such as the New York PublicLibrary rely upon funding from external sources forassistance.  Increased national awareness and continuedfunding is necessary to secure environmental conditionsand appropriate screening equipment, to preserveendangered materials, and to train television and videohistorians, archivists, catalogers and technicians. Such support and cooperation between the holders ofvideo collections will allow us to preserve our videolegacy.          Technical standards.  Scientific studies onvideo preservation issues must be undertaken to examinethe unstable properties of video in relation to timeand environment and to determine the negative impact ofstorage materials, systems and environment.  Nationalstandards must be established, published and widelydisseminated so that television and video archivistsare not left to rely upon their own experiences and thestudies conducted by the manufacturers of the mediamaterials.  A forum such as the National Moving ImageDatabase would provide a means of sharing bibliographicand technical information.  We fully endorse a nationalsurvey of all institutions collecting and/or preservingtelevision and video materials and are eagerlyparticipating in this survey.  This undertaking willprovide some sense of the volume and the scope of thenation's repositories.  The results may be daunting,but are essential to enlightened preservation decision-making.          On-going dialogue and information sharing. The New York Public Library already has become a"museum of equipment" as we face the need to preservevideotapes.  Keeping old equipment in proper workingorder and using a telephone network of concernedprofessionals around the world to trace needed machineparts has become a daily part of the preservation workof staff who handle videotapes.  Increased nationalattention and leadership to expand this network ofobsolete equipment and parts will be an essentialactivity if we are to retain the videotaped work of ourcollections.          Finally, we would like to encourage theLibrary of Congress to facilitate an on-going dialogueamong the various institutions whose comments weresought for this study and testimony, and to encourageindividuals and institutions not represented to join ina national effort.  The Library of Congress should leadthis effort to enable cooperation among institutionsand individuals, to share the wide range of concernsand problems associated with videotape preservation. Increased support is also needed for the professionalassociations which are already actively focused uponthe issues of videotape preservation.          The New York Public Library collects andpreserves materials in all formats and it is ourmission to provide free and open access to thesematerials.  A number of the units of the libraryactively collect videotape, and I am going to mentionjust a few items of our collection here or the types ofcollections, to give you an idea of the range of thepreservation problem which we are facing.  It will bein more detail in the printed copies that you receive.          At the Donnell Media Center which is curatedby Marie Nestus who is here in our audience, we have alarge collection of 15,000 videotapes which are heavilyused by our public.  Donnell collects exemplarytelevision programming, primarily American produced butincluding work from around the world.  We have neverhad he money to provide the kind of environment tostore these collections.   It's through the efforts ofMs. Nestus that we have preserved this collection,which is rare and often unique.            At the Library for the Performing Arts, wehave extensive video holdings.  The Theater on Film andTape Archive, known as TOFT, and curated by BettyCorwin, is the world's foremost collection of film andvideotape of live theater performances.  Throughagreements with unions and theatrical guilds, we areable to videotape live theater performances across theUnited States.  This is a large collection; it also hasa number of endangered films which we have transferredto "safer" tape for the moment.  Up to 132,000 feet ofendangered film is stored off-site.  These were earlyperformances done before we were actually usingvideotape.          The Dance Collection, curated by MadelineNichols, has an archive that is now in its 31st year,with over 8,000 videotapes.  51% of the use of theDance Collection is using videotapes that people cometo see at the site itself.  If we lose those, we havelost a way of looking at an art which we have never hadbefore.  That is to actually be able to see the dancersin action.  This is a very significant part of ourcollection and a very important one.          The Rogers and Hammerstein Archives ofRecorded Sound at the Performing Arts Library also hasa large collection of music and opera videos.  Most ofthese are from European and Asian broadcasts, notreadily available in this country.  Part of the problemwith that collection is the fact that we do not have astandard cataloguing system for them.  Nationally we donot know what other people have yet, and it would bevery important to share this kind of information.          At the Schomburg Center for Research in BlackCulture, we have been documenting and preserving thehistory of black culture around the world and have alarge collection of videotapes there, in which areincluded historical, political, anthropological,religious, and performing arts documentaries.  Inaddition, we videotape our oral history interviews anddocument public programs which are not availableanywhere else.  The Schomburg Collection is curated byJames Briggs Murray who has been the founder and realsource of development in that program.          In the Humanities Center, in our manuscriptcollection, curated by Mary Boone-Bowling, thevideotape collection numbers over 150 videotapes withsubjects relating to 20th Century American history. They include documentaries, out-takes, and politicaland personal coverage of issues.  Using a grant fromthe U.S. Department of Education, we were able topreserve about 65 per cent of the film and videomaterial, but that program has been eliminated andthere are no longer any funds available.          In conclusion, let me say that because of theneeds and problems associated with the numerous andvarious collections housed at the New York PublicLibrary, we applaud the efforts of the Library ofCongress and its staff.  These hearings and theaccompanying survey provide an opportunity toparticipate with our distinguished colleagues in thisimportant step toward a national preservation programfor America's television and video heritage.          Thank you for this opportunity to discuss theNew York Public Library's concerns about thepreservation of this fragile and fugitive medium and toadd its support for a national preservation program.          MR. MURPHY:  Thank you, Mr. Watson.          I now ask Barbara London, who is the Curatorof Video at the Film Department of the Museum of ModernArt to give us her statement.          MS. LONDON:  Thanks.  It's the Department ofFilm and Video.  Thanks very much for the invitation to behere.          Since the founding in 1929 of The Museum ofModern Art, the institution has been dedicated toexhibiting, collecting and preserving the art of ourtime.  The Museum first presented video art in the 1968exhibition, "The Machine as Seen at the End of theMechanical Age."  This was only three years after thefirst consumer video camera was put on the market. These were exhilarating, formative years of video art.           Technical factors made it challenging formuseums to exhibit video.  Nothing was automatic. Reel-to-reel tape decks required that someone be onhand to thread up, start, and rewind each tape.  Forthe "Machine" show, Nam June Paik turned his LindsayTape into a video installation, by jerryrigging anendless tape-loop device.  He set two open reel half-inch playback decks about ten feet apart on a galleryfloor.  He ran the spliced-together tape between them. After about a week, Paik's Lindsay Tape wore out, itdied.  This classic work was presumed lost foreveruntil a kinescope version turned up in Germany a fewyears ago.  The kinescope at least give us an idea ofwhat this spirited work was like.          The next video appeared in the 1970"Information Show," along with Xerox and mail-art. Videotapes by artists from North and South America andEurope were shown.  Many of these titles havesubsequently been destroyed by fire and the extremehumidity of Brazil.          The Museum began its contemporary "Projects"exhibition series in 1971 with a site-specific, livecamera installation by sculptor Keith Sonnier.  Theearly video installations of Peter Campus, ShigekoKubota and Bill Viola, to name a few, followed in theproject series.            In response to the broad scope of video artbeing made internationally, the Museum established anon-going video exhibition program in a speciallydesignated gallery in 1974.  Since that time, we havepresented more than 2,000 independently producedvideotapes from 20 countries.  We have helped definethe evolving documentary, narrative, computer-generated, and other experimental genres.            In 1977 we launched "Video Viewpoints," alecture series.  Here artists present and discuss theirworks with an interested audience.  We've transcribedall of these talks and they are available toresearchers in the Video Study Center.  Around the sametime we began acquiring artists' videotapes.  Initiallywe purchased 3/4-inch sub-masters.  This was in 1975. During the 1980s, we shifted to acquiring one-inch sub-masters.  In the future, we will change over to apreservation format that is digital.  This willundoubtedly be a major undertaking, which fiscally weare not prepared to make yet.  When we do take thisstep, we will work directly with the artists and withother archives to use the best existing master.  Wewill not duplicate anyone else's efforts, we will worktogether.          Today our Video Study Collection includesmore than 800 titles.  We have the right to hold up tothree copies of each title:  a preservation sub-master,an exhibition copy, and a study copy.  Several yearsago with a grant from the MacArthur Foundation westarted cataloging the video collection and we havesucceeded; we are up to date.  We've used the StarSystem.  We've modified for our own purposes the Starprogram that our film colleagues at the Museum use.          As many of you know, the Department of Filmand Video Preservation Center has just been built.  Infact, as I speak, the collection is getting settledinto its new premises in the Catskills.  The videocollection now is stored under ideal conditions, 55degrees fahrenheit and 45 degrees relative humidity. We'll shift and adjust these as we learn that we shouldbe maintaining slightly different figures.  Each tapeand each storage shelf has a bar code sticker attachedto it.  This method has proven to be the most efficientcollection management system.  The bar coding is, ofcourse, connected to Star.          Our video preservation activities over theyears have been conducted with very limited funds,primarily from the New York State Council on the Arts. Whenever we can, we collaborate with other archives. To give you a few examples of what we've done, aboutten years ago we transferred John Sturgeon's earlyblack-and-white, half-inch, open-reel work to one-inch. We did part of this work up at the ExperimentalTelevision Center (in Oswego, New York), which I thinkhas already been mentioned.  We worked with the Kitchenin transferring Vito Acconci's PAL videotape entitled"Theme Song" on to one-inch NTSC.  We found out afterexhibiting Vito's tape and then holding on to theexhibition copy, that we had the only copy of this workin existence.  We had played the tape for at least amonth, for many hours.  This exhibition tape became thepreservation sub-master.          A few years ago we worked with ElectronicArts Intermix in remastering Tony Oursler's now flaking3/4-inch color videotapes.  So we worked closely withStephen Vitiello, who will speak on his project. Similar to FIAF members, video art archivists worktogether and pool financial resources, expertise andefforts.          The Museum has also acquired videoinstallations, which pose distinct preservationproblems.  In these environmental and sculptural works,disparate media are combined, such as video, thearchitecture of the room, some sculptural elements, andsometimes a computer controller.  For example, ourvideo sculpture, "Nude Descending a Staircase" byShigeko Kubota, uses video monitors with screens ofvery particular sizes, because they fit into particularholes cut into the risers of the plywood staircase. Our video installation, "Between Cinema and a HardPlace" by Gary Hill also has specific needs and veryspecific schematics and requires trained staff memberswho are knowledgeable about installing the work.           After any installation like this has beenexhibited for a long period of time, the speciallydesignated cameras, monitors or projectors have beenworn, and these in most cases are obsolete models. Replacement parts become impossible to find.  The loanfee the Museum charges when another institution borrowsan installation in the collection goes into a specialvideo installation preservation fund.  In time whenthese funds have built up enough, they will be used topurchase the necessary backup equipment and parts.          The Museum of Modern Art is well known forits exemplary film preservation work.  You are familiarwith our preservation activity with nitrate film, andmore recently with our Super 8 film endeavors. Similarly, our video preservation activities arecarried out so that work can be seen more widely bypresent and by future generations.  Our main purpose isto have high quality exhibition material.  The Museum'sunderlying mission is educational, to build anappreciation for the art of our time.  We've performedthis educational role through on-going exhibitions, theaccompanying program notes and catalogues, the Museum'smonthly and quarterly magazines, as well as ourcirculating video shows.            In 1984 the Museum opened a Video StudyCenter where scholars can come by appointment to doresearch using our more than one thousand catalogues,our numerous periodicals, our artist files,storyboards, and photographs.  This unique archivedocuments the history of video art.  We have rareephemeral material from the early community videogroups, early video programs in the alternativeexhibition spaces located around the world, as well asartist production labs at public television stations inthe United States and European television co-productionand exhibition projects.          The Museum feels strongly that exhibitioncollection and preservation go hand-in-hand.  In thefuture, great value will be placed on artist video ofthe 1960's, the 1970's and the 1980's, in the same waythat scholars look back to the film of the early 20thCentury, when there was a proliferation of film formatsand extraordinary creative activity.  Unfortunatelymuch early film has been lost.  Increasingly scholarswill look back to the video produced over the lastthirty years; they will search and discover a lot ofearly video has disappeared.            Video is a major art of our time.  There area significant number of international artists who haveconcentrated on video and installation throughout theirdistinguished careers.  They have developed distinctivethemes and stylistic vocabularies.  We must all worktogether to preserve this heritage, the true art of the20th Century.  How can we do this?  Because more fires,more earthquakes, more neglect will deprive us of ourvideo art masterpieces.          Here in the Empire State we have receivedsmall grants from the New York State Council on theArts.  I hope this can continue.  Unfortunately, withvideo preservation, the corporate world turns the otherway.  Preservation is not as flashy or as chic, asfunding such areas as computer video games.  It isdifficult to bring attention to the dilemma that wehave on our hands.  How do we preserve the great worksthat we have?  Can we set up an East Coast BAYVAC?  Wecannot wait until the best, best, best new video formatarrives.  We will lost too many vulnerable works in themeantime.  So I'm very grateful that we have thishearing, to get this on the record.          MR. MURPHY:  Thank you very much.  Next isDavid Weiss, executive director of Northeast HistoricFilm.          MR. WEISS:  Thank you, Bill.  It's a pleasureto be here and have a chance to make a statement today.          I feel a little bit I guess self-appointed torepresent the hinterlands, coming down from Maine; butmy remarks are more or less focused on the fact that weare a regional, relatively remote type of facility. I'll start by describing our organization and itscollections and policies a little bit.          We are a 501(C)3 non-profit corporationestablished in 1986.  Our mission is to preserve andmake accessible the moving image heritage of NorthernNew England.  We have recently purchased and arerenovating a 1916 theater building as our home.  Wehave seven full-time equivalent employees.  Thefacility includes a temporary climate-controlled vaultwhich is kept at 60� fahrenheit and 45% relativehumidity.  There is no air filtration.  We've designeda permanent storage facility but we probably won't getaround to building it for two or three years, if then. We have a reference and research  library, publicexhibition area, 125-seat theater, and a technicalservices area for repair of film and transfer of filmto videotape, and administrative offices.          Of our collections of four million feet offilm and 2,000 hours of videotape, about 50 per centare television or video materials and the dates rangefrom 1953 to the present.  We have collectionsrepresenting seven of Maine's television stations,which includes mostly 16mm news film, some two-inch,one-inch, 3/4 and Beta.          The TV collections include programming likeMaine Public Broadcasting's two-inch masters of aweekly Franco-American public affairs program calledL'fley L'mere, all political commercials broadcast fromone station from 1988 to the present on a variety offormats, 50 hours of unedited material and some finishdocumentaries on 3/4-inch videotape related to SamanthaSmith, who is a Maine elementary schoolgirl who went tovisit Gorbachev and then died in a plane crash, itattracted a fair amount of attention up there; as wellas the usual mass of 16mm news film, advertising andlocal programming.          Our video holdings include work like theArchie Stewart collection which starts with 60 years of16mm film which he shot from 1926 to 1986, andcontinued shooting on videotape and providing anenriched record using a VHS camcorder.  We haveindustrial works on beta, including a record of a Maineisland telephone system shot for GTE-Visnet.  Othervideotape holdings include a visual studies student'sopen reel half-inch tape documenting the 1969 takeoverof the administration building at Harvard, and theLittle Tree collection which is also open reel half-inch and is a Native American, or an American Indian'sdocumentation of his knowledge of traditional medicinethrough long walks through the woods.          At our institution, television preservationis defined by safeguarding 16mm news film collectionsin temperature and humidity controlled storage andcreating master copies on beta and reference copies on3/4-inch and VHS.  Two-inch videotape will betransferred to beta as funding and staff time allows,the one-inch is left to its own devices.            We're facing preservation problems with openreel half-inch which after some effort we've given uptrying to transfer in-house.  We also have severalhundred unique 3/4-inch videotapes from the late '70swhich when we look at them they're not playing backcorrectly anymore and we don't have any real way todeal with those.  We don't have the finding tosystematically go at this; and I know that we have evenmore stuff from the early '80s which looks more or lessokay, but it will be an increasing problem.          Our preservation priorities, and I think hiswould be true for a lot of small regional places, aresplit between trying to preserve the most at-riskmaterials and focusing on the ones most likely togenerate revenue through stock footage or homevideotape distribution or other ways.  It is a constantissue that we struggle with.          Between 40 and 50 per cent of our collectionis available to researchers.  This means that thematerial has had some descriptive cataloguing and areference copy is available.  Copies where rights alloware available for reuse and a lot of video cassettesare available free for  outside loan to members ofNortheast Historic Film.  We have minimum records atthe collection level and detailed item levelcataloguing only for about 20 per cent of thetelevision and video collections.  We use LC subjectheadings and have a local thesaurus.  Three of the TVcollections we have have detailed production files.          I think one of the main points I reallywanted to make was that the specificities of ournation's regional life are an important part of ourhistory.  Collecting and rationally curating materialfrom small markets and non-national creators isimportant if we are to have a sense of ourselves as amulti-faceted society.  This work is important.  Thiswork cannot realistically be dealt with solely by theLibrary of Congress or other national facilities.  Acomprehensive national TV and video preservationprogram must include a network of organizations whotogether preserve the nation's television and videoproduction.  The coordination of the many stakeholdersin this endeavor is the key to success.          In the Northern New England region, NortheastHistoric Film is essentially the only archivalinstitution with a defined mission to preservetelevision and video materials.  Our primary area ofresponsibility is Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont; butwe know that Massachusetts, and with the possibleexception of Rhode Island, the rest of New Englandlacks curatorial attention to television and videotape,and I'm excepting from that statement places like WGBHand Harvard MIT, who are generally focused on things tthat the have produced or that relate to their ownactivities.          I recognize that this is not an ideal stateof affairs and we admit are lacking the resources to dobetter.  Yet we are in the region and we're making someprogress and I think that across the country many areasare worse off.          Our choices in accepting and prioritizingwork with television and video collections iscritically important.  Ninety-eight per cent of ourreference collection and most of the pool of potentialnew acquisitions being created today is on videotape. In addition, the only affordable way to provide accessto our film holdings is to create reference videotapes. And television stations are generating a vast amount ofvideotape material which could provide a rich chronicleof the years since the late '70s.          The development and continued viability ofour archives depends on our ability to preserve thismaterial.  Success in this area will require one, amore evolved relationship with television stations andother producers, i.e., a clarified relationship betweenarchives and the corporate entities that controltelevision production and dissemination; and two, theability to transfer television and video to new formatsbefore it falls apart on our shelves.            The Library of Congress can help by using itsstature to articulate a clear message that the nationalinterest is being served through the preservation ofthis material, coordinating the smaller players, andproviding guidelines or models of arrangements betweenarchives and copyright holders, television stations andproducers.  The producers of local television materialwant continued access to that material, limited costs,control of the images, and a sense of receiving fairvalue for their efforts.           I think that from my point of view basicallythe costs of preservation of those materials must beborne by revenues that are going to have to begenerated from those collections in one way or another,plus whatever the archives can bring to bear on theissue and whatever the creators decide to contribute. The creators are generally profit driven corporationsand they have to see a clear benefit both financiallyand perhaps a new sense of obligation to provide along-term social benefit before they'll get very muchinvolved.  The archives on the other hand wantownership of the materials, to enable grant writing andfund-raising, the freedom to relicense, allowing us toraise money through reuse, and to serve our mission ofallowing access to holdings.          We feel that there is some common ground tobe found between these positions and look forward toparticipating in the planning process.  Thank you.          MR. MURPHY:  Thank you, David.          And now our next speaker is Mr. GrahamLeggat, president of the board of directors from theMedia Alliance.  Mr. Leggat?          MR. LEGGAT:  Thank you.  It's a pleasure tosit on this panel with my friends an colleagues and toaddress such a distinguished panel.  I'm grateful forthis opportunity.          Unlike a number of the speakers who have justspoken, Media Alliance is not an archive or acollection.  Founded in 1979, it is instead an advocacyand service organization that's dedicated to advancingthe independent media arts, by which I mean video filmand related electronic media.  It's positioned betweenlocal and national groups, it's a statewideorganization, and it serves as an informationclearinghouse on video preservation, organizingtraining opportunities and networking events andproviding technical assistance.            In 1993 Media Alliance published a monograph,Video Preservation: Securing the Future of the Past, byDeirdre Boyle, who spoke earlier today, which has beenwidely distributed.            While today I'll address certain common needsof Media Alliance's diverse constituency, I'd like tonote that we're especially concerned with collectionsthat are held by groups that lack staff or resourcesdevoted to preservation; that is smaller organizationsand groups.  Media Alliance is concerned with thepreservation of videos that fall into two generalareas--video art works produced by national, regionaland New York artists, and community television,produced by community-based organizations and videocollectives.  Currently collections of these types ofvideo are housed in small or mid-size libraries,smaller museums, media art centers, college mediadepartments, video collectives, communityorganizations, public access television stations, andnon-profit distributors.  It's a unique body of workthat I'm talking about and it represents a majorinvestment of both public and private funds into anhistorical and cultural legacy that unfortunatelyremains largely out of reach of both scholars and thepublic.  Out of reach because in many cases the folkswho work in these organizations where these collectionsare housed are often unfamiliar with movie imagepreservation, conservation and collection management,and as I mentioned, lack the staff or resources toperform such tasks.           So we have a vast repository of treasures,cultural treasures that unfortunately are not beingable to be accessed as they might be.  The collectionsare largely uncataloged and the unavailability andunderuse is a great shame.  It often includes works bycultural communities that are traditionally under-represented in mainstream media.          New York in particular is home to atremendous range of video work produced in communitiesall across the  state, from New York City to remoteupstate towns.  This is due in large part to the workthat New York State has done through its state Councilon the Arts, and New York was the first state I believeto fund video as an art medium.  At the same time,federal, state and private dollars have supportedprojects promoting the use of video as a tool forcommunity development and dialogue.  Video productionsprung up within local boards of education, forexample, as the first examples of media educationprograms.  And communities and individuals thus weregiven the means to explore a dynamic and powerful newtool, one that was uniquely appropriate to express thespirit of grassroots community development that was soevident in the late '60s and '70s when video first wasborn as a medium of expression.          Community-based video production grew out ofthese democratic traditions and the ideas of freespeech and of equal opportunity, of activeparticipation in government and governmentresponsiveness to local needs that are so vital.  Whenartists and community producers picked up the firstopen reel half-inch video port-a-packs in the late'60s, the relationship of regular ordinary folks to thetelecommunications industry changed dramatically. Within a system conceived as a one-way path forcommunication, there grew a movement for non-commercialalternative media that continues today and the abilityfor communities to create their own video programmingprovides an opportunity for all folks, all Americans,regardless of race, creed, religion, class, orpolitical ideology, to speak, share their cultures, andtake part in the development of their local communitiesand national identity.          The media arts field has learned a great dealabout video preservation in recent years, not the leastof which is that it requires a multi-faceted approach,something that a panel like this one speaks very wellto and that I'm sure your speakers today have spokenwell to.  We've seen success in several priority areasthat have been identified through regional and nationalmeetings and it's clear from these meetings that wemust continue collaborations that bring together theresources of many institutions to benefit the field asa whole.  We must continue to create regional modelsthat link the expertise of local groups with that ofnationally recognized centers for film and videodocumentation and preservation.            I'd like to speak very briefly to two keyareas that we believe will be useful to look at in astudy.  Storage.  Of course, immediate steps must betaken to insure proper storage of video materials whileother long-term preservation strategies are developed. We have to recognize that it's not always desirable orfeasible to simply transfer collections to exitingmajor repositories.  Funding is needed to research thefeasibility of creating new storage facilities orupgrading existing facilities on a regional basis.  Anational survey along with accompanying regionalsurveys are needed to determine how moving images arecurrently stored, what the costs are, and whethercollaborative strategies are possible or desirable.          As far as cataloging is concerned, there'scurrently no infrastructure that allows intellectualaccess to many collections, especially to tapes made in1985 and earlier.  The early years of video.  Eachinstitution has attempted in its own way to documentand save its own collections.  Significant progress,however, is being made on a standard national databasethrough partnerships between the National Moving ImageDatabase, NAMID, a project of the American FilmInstitute and regional media arts and communitytelevision groups.           In the New York region, the immediate goal isto create an inventory level database of key at-riskcollections.  This initial level of cataloging willboth assist groups internally to allow them toprioritize which tapes or collections to work on first,as part of a long-term preservation plan.  It will alsoallow groups to work together to preserve tapes held incommon.  As part of the NAMID database, the informationwill eventually be accessible to scholars, educatorsand programmers, through recognized research networks.           As mentioned, many of these organizations aretypically unfamiliar with standard catalogingpractices.  In addition, computer and human resourcesare limited and existing hardware and software varygreatly.  Also, there are few available trainingprograms to teach cataloging and description of movingimage collections, and few models for compatibleinformation systems between institutions with similarcollections.  This is an unfortunate state of affairs.           While many groups are committed to principlesof compatible cataloging, they also need informationcollected by NAMID for their own purposes, such as in-house catalogues, publications, or reports.  And sofar, NAMID has worked closely with groups in upstateNew York to address these concerns, developing atemplate for compatible cataloging among five separatesites.          With severe cuts to the NEA however andchanges in the guidelines, the future of NAMID and itspartnerships with media arts groups is called intoquestion.  The NAMID must be stabilized with increasedfunding for participating funds, in particular forsmaller museums, libraries and artist spaces.             Physical preservation.  There's a continuingdebate over appropriate archival formats and thatdebate has confused funders--that's an unfortunate sideeffect--and those involved with preservation andconservation, and in some cases this confusion hasperpetuated inaction.  We need to balance the need tofind a stable format against the immediate need forduplication.  If we wait for the industry to develop anarchival format, we're effectively abandoning thecurrent collections.  We desperately need sites fortesting and for open experimentation with archivalformats and methods.  The work of BAVC, the Bay AreaVideo Coalition in San Francisco, is an excellent modelfor an environment in which information is freelyshared with the goal of making the best possibletransfer at the lowest possible cost.  BAVC's modelalso links research and experimentation to a site forcurrent production, a smart move.  It makes sense if wedo encourage producers to make an archival copies atthe time of their creation.          In terms of collection management, video artand community television collections offer uniquechallenges to collection management, beyond thephysical care of the material alone.  Collections maycontain work that was donated, produced on-site oracquired for exhibition or broadcast.  Significantworks exist in organizations that may not have adequatestaff or expertise to properly document theiracquisitions.  In order to provide access to materials,many groups need technical assistance to resolvequestions of ownership and copyright.  There is a needfor commissioned papers on these issues, using casestudies and offering recommendations for resolvingrights, with sample forms and documentation andguidelines to preventing future problems.  Archivists,librarians, producers, rights holders, programmers, areamong those who might be consulted in the developmentof such materials.          Finally, funding.  With little funding orexpertise, progress on preservation has been slow andpatchy.  Arts and cultural groups have sufferedcontinual cutbacks in private and public funding overthe last five years, since the late '80s.  Media artsis also one of the most under-funded disciplines forarts funding.  Thus, resources tend to go towardsproduction and public programming and not topreservation.          In addition, video preservation has alwaysbeen under-funded in relationship to film preservation. For example, while the American Film Institute offereda regrant program for film preservation, there's neverbeen a comparable program for video preservation.  Atiny fraction of the resources of NAMID, for example,have gone to groups such as Electronic Arts Intermix,Video Databank, and Anthology Film Archives, with majorinstitutions receiving the bulk of the funds.          In conclusion, it's our feeling, it's thefeeling of our organization, that national, regionaland local strategies are needed to address preservationissues.  Thus, for efforts to be truly successful,funding must be provided at all levels using multiplestrategies.  Existing organizations and collaborativeprojects such as NAMID, BAVC, and the New York regionalcataloging efforts, must be strengthened.           There are on-going needs for information andtechnical assistance and for periodic meetings tonetwork and to develop new skills.  These efforts areimportant at both the national and regional level, andin the distribution of funding and other resources, wemustn't force small organizations to compete againstmajor institutions and repositories.  There must be arecognition that tapes of significant value exist inmany different cultural and geographic communities. Thank you.          MR. MURPHY:  Thank you, sir.          Kate Horsfield from the Video Databank inChicago cannot be here today, so we'll move on to thenext speaker, Gloria Walker, who is here representingDeep Dish Television Network and Educational VideoCenter, and she is the Coordinator of CommunityOrganizer Television.          MS. WALKER:  Thank you.          MR. MURPHY:  Welcome.          MS. WALKER:  Thank you.  I want to thank youall very much for allowing me to come and do thispresentation, and thank everyone who's talked aboutcommunity media.          I work at Deep Dish and also at EducationalVideo Center.  I train community organizers to produceand use video as an organizing tool.  I discoveredcommunity media shortly after I graduated from filmschool at the University of Iowa in 1981.  Publicaccess was just getting started then and we were verylucky in Iowa City because Nicholas Johnson happens tolive there and as a former member of the FCC he helpedus write up our franchise agreement, so we had a realgood access center in Iowa City.          I had been a welfare mother my last year infilm school and after being a suburban housewife foreleven years, I became acutely aware of how cruel andinaccurate the images of women who--single mothers likemyself were, that were being presented in the press andin films and television.  With the Reagan campaign in1980, it seemed clear that politicians like to usethese distorted images to feed on people's hatred andignorance about poor people.  So I naturally became abig advocate for public access because I could see frommy own experience how these stereotypical and degradingimages really hurt people.  Public access not only gaveme a chance to develop my skills in producingtelevision, it allowed me the freedom to present myselfand others like me from a more accurate perspective.          About ten years ago when I had my ownproduction company I often transferred people's homemovies to video for them.  One film in particularstands out in my mind.  It documented a couple's tripout west.  The people who shot the film were evidentlyvery shy about being caught on camera, so the footagewas almost entirely of what they saw from their car,hours and hours of scenery of mountains, trees, andhighways rolling by.  A couple times as they panned tothe left, they would briefly catch the image of theperson driving.  They would immediately either stoprecording or pan back to the right, acting as if theimage of this family  member was a mistake.  Yearslater when the children of this couple viewed the videotransfer, it was this shot, the mistaken glimpse of theperson driving the car, that they would most treasure. Those mountains and highways are still there, but thepeople who were caught ever so briefly in these panshad died.  The children of this couple were delightedto catch these images of their parents when they wereyoung.          I tell you this story because I believe thatalthough community media, very much like the persondriving the car, may be considered too much on theperiphery, too "fringy" to be truly appreciated today,that a few years down the line it may be exactly whatwe or our children may find the most precious, the mostvaluable, as they try to understand the nature of thetimes we live in.          I work with Deep Dish TV.  I am a part-timeworker.  Deep Dish has a staff of three part-timeworkers.  We're a very low-budget operation but we do atremendous amount of work.  Deep Dish TV is thenation's first grassroots satellite television network. It was started in 1986.  It's more than a televisionnetwork though, it is also a network of activistsacross the country and internationally who producevideo to educate and organize around issues that arebeing ignored by the mainstream media.  Our programsare down-linked by over 300 public access stations inthe United States and some PBS stations and they'vealso been seen internationally.          I lived in Albuquerque for four years and oneof the high points of the time I lived there working atthe access center was when we did an up-linkcelebrating the 500 years of resistance when otherpeople were celebrating Columbus.  It was veryexciting.  We were able to--we had a call-in portionand we had a panel of Native Americans and Chicanopeople talking about environmental justice issues andit was a very powerful experience for us because theywere sharing their stories, but we were also gettingphone calls from people in Canada, people in Florida,because anyone with a dish, who happens to have asatellite dish could also pick up our programming.  Soit was a very exciting moment.  And to me it kind ofexemplifies the power of community media, when peoplecan get access to the technology that normally theydon't have access to.  But it's kind of a matter ofusing imagination and technology to be able to use thesatellite to link people in a community basis all overthe country and potentially all over the world.          Deep Dish has always been conscious of theheavy emphasis of mainstream media on New York and LosAngeles as production centers and has actively workedto have programming produced in and covering otherparts of the country and of the world.  Deep Dish wasstarted by Paper Tiger TV actually.  Paper Tiger is acollective that produces media critiques, very clever,often biting critiques of mainstream media.  Theirprograms are shown here on public access and there'ssuch a demand for them in universities across thecountry and internationally that they started to lookinto using a satellite, and that is how they developedthe idea of Deep Dish television.  They wanted to seewhat was going on in the rest of the country, see whatother people working in their communities were doingwith video, and so they started doing outreach.  SoDeep Dish was kind of borne out of that.          Paper Tiger has an international reputationfor producing these videos and we often show PaperTiger shows on Deep Dish television.  We work veryclosely with Paper Tiger, especially like on the GulfCrisis series that was produced.  This is a series thatwas very important to all of us because as everyoneknows who lived through that "war" there wasn't muchcoverage on regular television, once the bombs starteddropping, of any dissent.  It was very hard to see thatthere was anyone in this country who was opposed to thewar.  And this project really showed the other pointsof view, plus it had a lot of very valuable informationthat went into the history of the region in the MiddleEast.  So this kind of programing is very, veryexceptional, it's a pity that more people don't knowabout it and aren't aware of it, and that's kind of ourconstant mission, to let people know about Deep Dish TVand to know that they can participate in it.  It's avery democratic use of video.          Another group I'd just like to mention is thePeople's Video Network.  It's a group of activists whowork with unions, producing programs.  They've recentlyproduced a program on Mumia Abu-Jamal, a blackjournalist who was almost executed last August.  Therewas a national outcry in support of Mumia and a lot ofwork went into producing videos and distributing videosabout Mumia's case, and it's clear that video did playa very important role in helping this execution--he gota stay of execution right before he was supposed to beexecuted.  So, as an example of the way that video canbe used actually to save lives.          I'd also like to mention the Alliance forCommunity Media.  It's a national organization ofpeople who work with public, government, andeducational access facilities.  They hold a hometownvideo festival every year that selects the best entriesof works produced by community producers.  So I'mbringing up all these different organizations; I don'tjust want to talk about Deep Dish, so that you knowthat there already is an infrastructure here of ways ofselecting the best of community media that's beingproduced.          Oh yes--and all of the organizations I'vejust mentioned are all non-profit organizations.  Noneof them have very much money and none of us that I knowof have the facilities to archive our tapes in theproper manner.  I do hope that you will consider someway of allowing us to still archive our tapes with theLibrary of Congress and to maybe even--I would reallylike to see us have, as was suggested earlier, alibrary set up for distributing these alternative kindsof videos and to store them in a safe way because it isreally valuable, and I think on down the line in a fewyears their value will actually increase even more thanthey are today.          I recently learned that the Library ofCongress made several requests for copies of Newsreelfilms.  The New York Newsreel was a collective ofactivists who produced over 200 films during the '60sand early '70s that documented many of the same kindsof things that Deep Dish TV, the People's VideoNetwork, and Educational Video Center produce today. Organizers working in communities, people demonstratingand working for social change and injustices such aspolice brutality, and I just want to read a quote fromthe Catalogue of the New York Newsreel.  "For the mostpart, the established media has always served theinterest of the corporate giants.  Newspapers, radio,and television are almost exclusively controlledthrough advertising by the major corporations.  Theyhave conspired to maintain a monopoly on publicinformation and manipulate public opinion to suit theirinterests.  Newsreel's goal was to place the power ofthe film media into the hands of poor and workingpeople to serve their interests and needs.  In Newsreel films, it is the people who speak out strongly againsteconomic exploitation, racism, sexism, and U.S.military aggression in Southeast Asia."           There actually, before the New York Newsreelthere was a Film and Photo League of the 1930's and Ijust recently found out about them and I'd like to reada little bit of information from an article.  ThePeople's Video Network produces a magazine and this istaken from an article in here about the Film Videoleague, or the Film Photo League.  They produced filmsand photos during the Depression.  "In a period wherethe press denied the reality of the suffering aroundthem, it was not known as the Great Depression untilafter it was over, the Film and Photo League documentedthe desperate conditions and heroic struggles theDepression was known for--evictions, bread lines,strikes, hunger marches, the Bonus March, theScottsboro Case, the Hoovervilles, the demonstrationsand protests, and the everyday lives of the people. Because the press never admitted there was adepression, many people felt atomized and isolated intheir suffering, their loss of jobs, evictions, hunger. People blamed themselves or their local community. Like today, the reality of most people's lives were notreflected in the corporate media and the documentariesof the FPL were not suitable fare for the only majormedia outlet at the time, the Hollywood controlledmovie theaters.  The newsreels that were shown tendedeither to be patriotic propaganda or diversionaryfluff, flagpole sitters or how many people could fitinto a phone booth.  In order to show theirdocumentaries FPL members would take their newsreels tounion halls, farms, one-room schoolhouses, andchurches, frequently in places with no electricity. They would hook the handcrank projector's bulk to a carbattery, pin a sheet between two trees and run theirfilms.  Leo described the reaction of their audiencesto seeing their documentaries--their jaws would dropopen.  People were amazed to see that they were notalone in their problems.  The same thing was happeningto people all over the country and the world.  Thereactions that many of the Film and Photo Leagueworking class audiences had in viewing thesedocumentaries depict in their own reality has manyparallels to the current day.  Today's audiences facemany of the same problems, confused, isolated, and liedto.  One study carried out during the Gulf War showedthat the more TV people watched, the less they knewabout what was going on."  And again, I just want tosay that the Gulf Crisis TV project was a very strongresponse to the media tendency to ignore the dissent inthis country against the war.  And it was carried bysome PBS stations.          MR. MURPHY:  You'll have to bring youstatement to a conclusion.          MS. WALKER:  Sum up, okay.  Well, I wouldjust like you to consider that what entertains us todaymay not be what we want to know about ourselves and ourworld tomorrow.  Thank you.          MR. MURPHY:  Thank you.  Our next speaker isStephen Vitiello, the director of distribution fromEAI, Electronic Arts Intermix.          MR. VITIELLO:  Thank you.            MR. MURPHY:  Speak into the microphone,please?          MR. VITIELLO:  Thank you very much.          Electronic Arts Intermix was founded 25 yearsago to support video as an art form.  Howard Wise, whowas a director of a gallery of kinetic art recognizedvideo as being that much more exciting, that much morepowerful and still fairly unrecognized.          In the 25 years that we've been in existence,we've represented large bodies of work by over 200artists from all over the world.  We now represent alibrary collection of about 2,000 titles.  We holdobsolete formats, we hold archival formats, wedistribute primarily on 3/4-inch and VHS that haveseen--I'm not sure, I can't even know how many formatssort of come through our places and keep moving out.          The job that I've come in contact with, justdealing with preservation has been through necessity. What distinguishes our collection is a little bitdifferent than some of the other people who have spokentoday, is that our collection exists totally foraccess.  We have tapes so that they may be distributed. We do preservation based on request.  And my own job asdistribution director is really not a technical job,but yesterday I spent four hours out of eight trying totransfer a tape which featured Mr. Erik Barnouw, who ison your table earlier, a documentary on Hiroshima, fora high school teacher who was buying a tape out of herown money and needed it by the end of this week.          We work very closely with the artists that wedistribute.  Many of the artists are exclusive to ourdistribution.  Several people mentioned Nam June Paiktoday.  About four years ago he said to me, before Idie you must find all of my masters from WNET, whicheverybody had said were thrown away.  I contacted thearchive at WNET where he had produced over 15 programs. The person I spoke to didn't know who he was.  Imentioned Global Groove, which is perhaps the mostwell-known international experimental video, andeverybody just said those tapes are gone.  Some of themmay be in storage with Anthology Film Archives, which Ifound some very valuable material, but it was generallyout-takes that the station had thrown away.          At the last moment I found a box of 3/4-inchtapes, some of which were 20 year sold and were readyto be thrown away.  On the tapes were scribbled justnumbers and letters, and through lots and lots of phonecalls and sort of figuring and guessing, I came to findout that those were can numbers.  I called back thesame man at WNET and I said do you have L1, 2, 3, etcetera, and he said oh, yes, that's Global Groove, NamJune Paik, we have the material.  And through a friendwho was in doing programming at the station I had 23 Ithink two-inch tapes arrive on my floor, and Nam Junecame in the office, sat on the floor, and looked likethe happiest little kid I had ever seen in my life.            It really is true that cataloging thismaterial is still very, very new.  I think also whentalking about video, I don't know how to say this quiteso articulately, but there should be some equivalent ofwhen we talk about animals and dog years.  Because thevideo that I was trying to transfer yesterday with ErikBarnouw was a sub-master made about 7 or 8 years agoand it was not play, it would clog and heads over andover and over, and I think everybody, every discussiontoday has brought up still photographic film or 16mm or35mm film.  And a 7-year-old video is sort of like a70-year-old film in dog years.            I've been overseeing the transfer of somehome movies from 1916 through 1925, about seven hoursby one family, and they've transferred far morebeautifully than tapes that are 5 or 6 or 7 years old.                 Another thought I've had sitting here all dayis that one big missing chair on your very importanttable is industry, meaning there should be arepresentative from SONY, there should be someonewho's--it's sort of like giving us a boat that wouldsink in five years and being told to live on there. The industry who produces these formats.  I've hearddifferent people recently say between 60 and 100formats of video since inception.  The people creatingthose formats should really help take responsibility. I mean SONY, I know in Alabama was doing free transfersto VHS or betamax and we sent some tapes there as atest.  Six months later I got back the tapes butwithout any sound.  And the idea of transferring to VHSis also just giving you another incredible ephemeralform that won't last more than another few years.  So Ithink it's something very important for these talks,whether you have to kidnap them or drag them in by thehair, to make them see that one of the most importantmeans of communication has been offered from theirhands and in certain ways it's been sort of--had itshead chopped off at times.          One other thing if I may, I'll mention, isthat we have been very lucky to receive some fundingfrom the New York State Council on the Arts andoccasionally even private collectors.  But it'sabsolutely never enough.  And the only way that we'vereally managed to take care of the tapes that we haveis through collaboration such as Barbara mentioned withthe Museum of Modern Art, with other distributors, withartists.  I've had collectors who wanted to buymaterial; I've asked them instead to support thetransfer of totally unknown material; had people whowere doing programming but couldn't afford our purchasefees, but they also happened to work in technicalfacilities, had them give us free, in one case D-1transfers in exchange for a fair number of freerentals.  I think the more we communicate within ourown field and with all the people who called very week,we get calls from all over the country just asking foradvice, that there's always ways to take care of thematerial without much money, although there's alwayssome that's needed.            Thanks very much for the opportunity.          MR. MURPHY:  Thank you.           I see Robert Haller has arrived and we'll askhim to come to the witness table and make a statementon behalf of Anthology Film Archives.          MR. HALLER:  I hope my voice survives, I'vegot the flu.          My name is Robert Haller, I'm the director ofAnthology Film Archives.  I've got a two-page writtenstatement which I'll go through quickly.          Anthology Film Archives began restoringvideotapes in 1983.  As time and resources havepermitted, we have continued with this work.  In 1983,the condition of early video, the first decade of 1965to 1975, was already a catastrophe with much early andimportant work decayed or lost.  Since then videotapematerials have been improved by the manufacturers, butthey are still not sufficiently stable to be used as apreservation material.          Our institutional focus, that is Anthology'sinstitutional focus, is personal, independent, andexperimental video.  It is both a form of expressionand a distinctive record of the last third of thiscentury.  Independent video is the polar opposite ofbroadcast commercial television.  Individually producedmade with the expectation of narrow casting rather thanbroadcasting across continents, independent video aimsat viewers who embrace challenges and questions ratherthan entertainment and answers.          Decades from now the videotapes made byindependent and experimental artists will be at leastas important if not moreso as the product made by thenetworks and seen by millions.  Though the audience forindependence is small, they speak with an uncompromisedauthenticity less frequently found in the mass media.          In this context, the fragility of independentvideo made on half-inch tape on equipment with ashorter shelf life and electronics often moreidiosyncratic than those used by the networks is a grimspectacle that resembles a sandy beach awaiting itsannual visit by a Caribbean hurricane.  The grains ofiron oxide, like the grains of sand, will be swept awayunless they are trucked to safety; in our case, to avideo archive where temperature and humidity will slowthe deterioration that will come in the most gentle ofclimates.  Then if the necessary playback equipment hasalso been preserved and if people care and funds existto re-record the independent signal onto what is then,and I stress then the state-of-the-art video format, atape's life will be extended for another decade or so.          Because the technology is still evolving, we,those of us who are working with video preservation,are denied the benefits that came to film early in thecentury when standard gauges, 35mm and later 16mm, atfixed rates of frames per second, allowed films madeanywhere to be shown nearly everywhere for almost anytime, now 100 years.          What in summary am I saying?  That tape is sounstable that it's care demands extraordinary measures,that personal experimental video needs even more thanthat produced by commercial sponsors, that financialsupport for this restoration is tiny and likely to staythat way, and that because the technology is evolvingwith the velocity which exceeds 24 frames per secondbut will not and probably should not be standardizedyet, our task is impossible.  But of course we keeptrying because we have no choice.  As Winston Churchillsaid, "Never give up, never, never, never."          MR. MURPHY:  Thank you.  Well, let us beginwith some questions.          Certainly the variety of materials thatyou've described in the last few minutes is quiteincredible.  There is a world beyond networks and we'reglad to hear of that.  I have a question to begin.            Those of you who do work with video artists,what are the typical terms that a video artist mightrequire from an archive or a museum for deposit? Barbara?          MS. LONDON:  Well, since the video collectionbegan, I've been more interested in purchasing than inreceiving gifts, because artists have spent a lot ofmoney to produce a work.  So we have a contract, and asI said, this entitles us to three copies.  So what theartist expects is the work has a home, we have apreservation sub-master.  We take it on as a work ofart and we will do our darndest to have that existforever.  We have the rights only to show it in themuseum unless we have negotiated special rights to putit into the circulating film video library, or to putit into a traveling show.            And I always say to artists, I'm also a wordjunkie, give me every shred of paper you have about thework.  So that's what goes into the study center.  Sofor me, that's very important then, when the catalogingtime comes that there's information on the pastexhibition, where the original is, all kinds ofproduction notes.          MR. HALLER:  At Anthology our position is abit different.  Most of our material comes from peoplewho are dead, so even though I would like to get thewritten material that Barbara's talking about, it'susually not available.          Well, for instance, we are working on a largeEd Emschwiller project right now, the Channel 13collection that was referred to a few minutes ago is instorage at Fort Lee, New Jersey.  And we discoveredthat much of the material is in formats that we arestill trying to decipher.  It's difficult.          MR. MURPHY:  Jim?          MR. LINDNER:  It's a little daunting, atleast for me as a panelist, in that the scope of thepanelists and the different places you come from isvery diverse; but it seems to me that one thing youhave in common is, or at least two things--one is thatmatures aren't holding up and the other is that youhave a real need to provide access.  And it seems to methat there's some way where there's some kind of fit,and I don't have an answer here; I'm sort of asking fora question in that I'd like to find out what kind ofprograms you have in place to have access fund or helpfund preservation, and whether that's realisticallyviable from a financial standpoint, for whether thefees that you could charge for access are so small thatyou could never begin to do any meaningful work,because it seems that you all share this common, thatyou all need to preserve things and you all need toprovide access.          MR. VITIELLO:  We offer about five differentlevels of purchase which goes from $45 to an individualor $200 for VHS copy to a university, to up to $2,000for some of the larger museums who collect on one-inchor D-2.  And often that money, the larger archivalpurchases are used directly--I mean we've sold tapesthat weren't preserved so that we could use that moneycoming in to provide a much healthier copy.          MR. LINDNER:  But do you actually generate aprofit through access?  In other words--or maybe not aprofit but less of a deficit, if you will?  Is usingaccess funds a viable way to sort of bring yourorganizations out of this--          MR. VITIELLO:  For us, that's how we survive,is by distributing, which is for us--which is thenaccess.  We get what was once--I guess 50 per cent wasfrom public funding and now I guess it's down to about30 per cent of how we survive as public funding.  Andthe rest is through renting and selling the tapes.          MR. LINDNER:  So is it fair to assume thenthat if you had more access then you'd get more money?          MR. VITIELLO:  Yes.          MR. LINDNER:  So since it would seem to bethat if all of your organizations all have valuablematerials that people want to see, that at least partof the problem is getting the word out if you will, ofletting people know, potential viewers who are outthere in the world, that these materials are available,they can be seen, and that the revenue that will begenerated by that accession would help sort of floatthe ship, as it were--is that a fair--          MR. VITIELLO:  Um-hem.          MS. LONDON:  But the people who want to seethat work are other museum curators, writers, artists,who if we charge more than $5, I don't think they couldpay it.  And I think I'd rather look at other avenuesof getting revenue together, like I'm always trying tobe very clever, so with an exhibition, say when we dida documentary show curated by Deirdre Boyle, we raisedenough money to then go and preserve some of the reallyearly works.  When one of my colleagues in painting andsculpture will say oh, I'm doing this show on Germanart from the '80s, why don't you do a video program atthe same time, I'll say okay, if you buy thevideotapes.  And then I get new work into thecollection that I wanted.  So I'm always--I think we'reall trying to sort of take from here and put it hereand pull it.          MR. LINDNER:  But except that there areorganizations which are profit-making organizationswhich are stock footage houses which do exactly--          MS. LONDON:  But I don't have the rights toturn over say Nam June Paik's Global Groove in mycollection to a stock footage house.          MR. LEGGAT:  Also, it's appropriate fordistributors to use access as a revenue-producingagent, but it's not necessarily appropriate for amuseum or a library or something like that.  Inaddition, stock footage houses, the footage belongs ina different economy from that which video art andcommunity media belongs.  Typically stock footagehouses make money because their footage can be used incommercial projects and it's not always the case saythat hours of public access programming or video artsor community media, those are not images that peoplewant in their commercial projects typically.  So we'retalking often about two different medias.  Nonetheless,there are, as you point out, there are someorganizations for whom access can be used as a revenue-producing mechanism, but it doesn't speak to everyone,it doesn't speak to the whole picture.          MS. LONDON:  And also there is the issue ofcopyright.  When it comes to stock footage, I meanthat's--          MR. LINDNER:  I was using--I don't want to--when I was referring to stock footage, what I wasreferring to is that for different markets, differentfees are appropriate for different applications, and sonot everyone charges $5 for access.  Clearly ifsomeone's going to put something in a feature film, ifyou have a copyright, it's going to be a lot more than$5.          MS. LONDON:  Right, but--          MR. LINDNER:  And so I guess what I'm tryingto get at is there a way for the Library of Congress tohelp in this issue of access in terms of allowing thevisibility if you will of your collections to be largerthan--as a whole  you represent a huge amount ofincredibly important material.  But as individualsyou're each under-funded, you're small and in somecases very regional, very local, and I'm just sort ofthrowing out the idea that by heightening the overallvisibility of the works that are contained within yourcollections, that that would indeed increase access andthat would indeed increase funding to allow you tosurvive better.  It's just an idea that I just had andI don't know whether it's viable or not.          MR. MURPHY:  David?          MR. FRANCIS:  Well, as you can see, wehaven't got anyone on the panel from the industry andthe Library of Congress is just another advocacyorganization as far as this is concerned.  We just hopeour advocacy may be in a different plane.          I'd like to find a recommendation that wemight actually achieve, which helps the area we've beentalking about.  I've been trying to all the time thinkof something and it's very, very difficult.  There doesseem to be one advantage in the formats you're workingwith.  The equipment is pretty portable, the older andthe newer equipment.  The only thing that I couldreally think of, and I'd have to let your advocacygroups come up with this, was a proposal under whichthere might be a small pool of equipment which could beborrowed by organizations.  Perhaps some of the olderequipment could be available as well.  It could bepassed from one organization to another to enable themto cope with certain transfer difficulties.          I'm really trying to think of something thatwe could put as a recommendation that we as advocatesmight be able to persuade someone else to fund.  Onehates to have in a final report recommendations thatare not achievable.  So I was really just trying tosay, if any of the advocacy groups here felt they couldput together a proposal that was achievable, that we,ourselves might be able to find someone to support, Iwould really like that.          MS. LONDON;  Some of us have talked, I knowI've talked with Mona, and I know preservation is ofcourse very important, say the Center upstate,Experimental TV Center, they have all kinds of oldformats, there's an incredible artist-become-engineerwho's amazing.  It would be great to see that center oranother one like Electronic Arts Intermix, if they wereinterested, or someone else, where we do all worktogether like the Bay Area Coalition in San Francisco. I think they've provided an excellent model and I thinkit's like their model, the equipment is all there,they've got the technician now who knows how to workit, he's pooling together experience, he's worked withthe regional artists.  So I think thinking of sort ofthis as a region--          MR. FRANCIS:  It seems at the moment that theadvocacy groups are really concentrated in the New Yorkand the L.A./San Francisco areas.  Is it possible touse the models that already exist in other areas?  Isthere any way of bringing people together in otherareas to achieve similar groupings so that there can befour or five centers in the country?  I'm just tryingto think of something that one can propose that isachievable in some way.  It's very difficult.  I'mclutching at straws, I know.          MS. WALKER:  I think we all have ideas, it'sjust a matter of funding.  I think archival facilitiesregionally based would be wonderful, a place where wecould store our tapes at the right temperature andhumidity and have equipment there.  It would bewonderful to be able to have that kind of facility, butI don't know.          MR. FRANCIS:  What I'm trying to say is canyou come forward with some sort of proposal that is notso big that it has no chance of success.  I would liketo feel that we had some recommendations that we mighthave some chance of achieving.  I'm looking to you tocome forward with something that would help--not thetotal answer, but a start.          MR. LEGGAT:  When is your deadline?  When doyou need it by?          MR. MURPHY:  This year.          MR. FRANCIS:  We have to complete the--          MR. MURPHY:  Under negotiation.          MR. FRANCIS:  --and the report by the end ofthis year, so there's a bit of time.          MR. MURPHY:  As a group, your organizationsprobably have had more experience with half-inch EIAJtape than the larger archives and certainly  moreexperience than the networks themselves, because EIAJnever had an impact in the networks.  Is this a crisisformat or can you still get equipment, is the equipmentworkable?  Can someone speak from their experience incopying half-inch tapes?          MR. VITIELLO:  The answers are yes toeverything.  It is a crisis format, but it is stillpossible to have the tapes cleaned and transferred. There's several places that we worked with.  I thinkfor the general public the information is very limited. I've spoken to so many people who have baked theirtapes, so many people have hand-cleaned them withPalmolive on film reels and--serious--artists or peoplewho have been in the field for 30 years and still kindof resort to guerilla methods either because of moneyor just not trusting sending their tapes off toCalifornia.          At our office we have four half-inch reel-to-reel players.  The heads on all of them are gone and Ihaven't found anybody who can help us replace those. So for the moment I've stolen one from the WhitneyMuseum and transferred a bunch of tapes.  But just oneother thing about  half-inch that I've found is thatit's not always the case that once I've tracked downthe original material and transferred it, it's notalways in better condition than a 3/4-inch copy thatwas made 7 or 8 years later.  So it's important to getas many copies as possible to work with and to compareand contrast, but it's not always the oldest or mostoriginal that I believe to be the most useful material.          MR. MURPHY:  Thanks very much.          We'll now have the next panel come forward.          Let me say that your being last has nothingto do with the importance of you presentations.  I onlyarranged it because I know you people live relativelyclose by and you can get home without too much trouble.          But we're very happy to see you here todayand look forward to your statements, and let us beginwith Sara Meyerson, a consultant in the area of videoarchives.          MS. MEYERSON:  Thank you.          Good afternoon.  I feel really privileged tobe able to speak here today.  Is this working?          MR. MURPHY:  Yes.          MS. MEYERSON:  And it is really with greatpride in our profession that I view the enormousefforts that everyone has made here and elsewhere tofurther this investigation into the state of televisionand video preservation and restoration.          I spent 20 years as the archivist and managerof the ABC News Film Tape Libraries and when I startedthere was just so much to do, there were so few of usin this field of moving image collecting andpreserving, and there was little background materialavailable to help with my talk.  But I found Sam Surattat CBS and thus followed endless phone calls and weeklylunches discussing mostly my problems which he helpedme with enormously.  I think he may have gotten tiredof it, but he seemed to have a lot of patience.          However, we managed to create standards forour TV archives and set up the foundations for thecataloging and preservation of these materials.  It wasa lonely task, but somewhere in the mid-1970's a groupstarted to meet in Washinton and that was the beginningof our professional organization, the Association forMoving Image Archivists, and after that I didn't feelso alone.          Television is one of the most potentinformational, cultural and historical media of ourtime, but the preservation and restoration of itsimportant historical heritage has not nearly kept upwith the enormous amounts of materials that have beenproduced, and we've been talking about that, and thereare many obstacles in the way.  But these publichearings, papers and reports will provide us with manyof the reasons and the obstacles.  I've watched thearchival community make many in-roads, but the largepart of the journey is ahead of us.          I want to talk about or reflect on today, twoareas that we have talked about today, but perhaps mysolutions or moves to solutions will be appreciated. The first of course is access and its ramifications. The second is communications between archives.  In asense, one is dependent on the other, but each is alsoseparate.  So I thought I'll start to talk about accessfirst, and this is just one of the small areas ofaccess.          Without access, preservation doesn't meananything.  And so we have to try to improve some of ourtools of access, the cataloging and descriptive tools,the computer applications, the Internet, the on-lineservices, CD Roms and the other new things that are yetto come.  The cataloging of material differs in publicinstitutions, stock footage houses, broadcasting, andindustry archives.  We have been trying to work on astandard and have established rules but they didn'talways apply to everyone.  Much  material is catalogedtoo extensively, creating long records, taking too muchtime, and thus material is not available in a timelyfashion.  I'm happy to see that a cataloging standardsgroup has been formed by the Program for CooperativeCataloging and they want to devise a core bibliographicrecord standard for audio/visual materials.  And itsother purpose is to create a level of completenesssomewhere between minimal and full level logging, whichI am glad to hear about.  It's a beginning to simplifysome of the cataloging.  It's extremely necessary,especially for small archives that do not have thestaff or the time and do not need lengthy records.           During my years at ABC we developed our ownstandard which was a combination of stock footageterms, which is very exacting for moving images, andgeneral descriptions.  This gave us concise visualdescriptions and enough narrative to round out therecord; but they weren't extremely lengthy and theywere very easy to accomplish.  The use of this practiceI think is especially good for smaller archives who aregrappling with local news footage or other things, andthey can do it more quickly, and it is pertinent tohave this record of regional America, especially in oursmaller archives throughout the country, to have itavailable as quickly as possible.          The next access tool that has become theavailable of archival holdings on the Internet, CD Romsand other direct services, and we can say great, noweveryone who looks can find out what the holdings areand can find what they're looking for.  However, thishas created more problems, most importantly copyrightissues.  And although I don't want to go into a lotabout copyright issues because that's for some placeelse or someone else, the copyright issues are going tobecome more and more problematic, coupled with thevagueness of the copyright law.  This had made thesequestions more and more difficult.  We need to protectthe holder of the copyright but we also need to protectthe institution holding the materials.  And now we havea problem--yes, we have access.  But can we use thesematerials?          We've had countless seminars, paneldiscussions, round-table discussions, written papers,and I've come away a little wiser but not that much.  ithink that we need to establish a task force that wouldcreate specific guidelines to identify the realproblems facing both users, holders and holdinginstitutions and to create a forum for discussionlocally and nationally.  If we don't do this soon, theproblems will become uncontrollable, and copyrightinfringement on the Internet for example is one of themost critical issues which is facing our work, and bothindustry and archives are really concerned with it.          Another issue facing access is non-access. Unfortunately, many of the broadcasting, advertisingand other industry archives have limited or non-accessto their materials.  And though I understand the basisfor these restrictions because I've worked with themfor many years, I do think these private archives needto find ways to provide more public access and/or startto seriously contribute the materials to publicinstitutions, so that educators, scholars, students,producers and others will be able to use theseresources.          How do we encourage them to deposit intopublic institutions?  I could suggest twopossibilities.  One, maybe we could create industryincentives.  What those industry incentives are wouldbe a whole discussion and I'm not sure I can addressthat right now.  The other I think is if we providedclear and concise copyright guidelines, industry mightbe more willing to contribute material to publicinstitutions because they would be less fearful.          It's imperative and necessary for industry toplace important materials into public institutions andthis leads us into my next concern and that is the lackof communications between archives.  It is true thearchival community has made gigantic progress when in1984 the National Center for Film and VideoPreservation was instituted under the AFI to facilitatethese discussions and service the archival field.  Theyhave been influential in keeping the field engaged indiscussions for the past 12 years and have widened thecommunity by bringing together more diverse groups. They have gone out there to create dialogues betweenarchives.  We need more of this.  We do haveOperational Group Armia which holds a yearly conferenceand tries to keep in touch with its constituents.  Butthis is not enough.  We need more forums for educationand we need large public and private archives to takethe lead.          Next I would like to see the establishment oflocal networks that meet regularly to shareinformation, to help each other to provide ways ofoutreach, to create programs, and to foster publicawareness of the importance of preservation.  Some waysto increase this awareness could be archives doingprograms together locally, perhaps storing materialstogether to save money, to pool restoration sources,and we talked about this before, that we really try toget together to accomplish this.  Even in a city aslarge as New York we don't have a local TV and videogroup which  meets regularly to discuss our problemsand to try to pool some resources.          I would also like to see industry forming agroup, perhaps a TV foundation, to raise funds forpreservation just as The Film Foundation.  There aremany people, wealthy people in this industry, I meanbig producers of materials, that might be interested toform such a foundation.  How we approach them and howwe can get them to do this, that's something that wewould have to discuss further.          We need some material, we need some nationalguidelines to help and encourage to do this.  The taskahead is great, but if we can start to create easieraccess and more cooperations between archives, we canbegin to gain the awareness that we need to help ourmission to save television history.          MR. MURPHY:  Thank you, Sara.          Sam Suratt, formerly with CBS News andformerly before that with the Smithsonian inWashington.  Very happy to see you here today.  Sam?          MR. SURATT:  Thank you.  And thank you forinviting me to speak before this august body on asubject that I have very dear to my heart and have hadfor some years.  And thanks to Sara for her kindremarks.  I was fond of saying that in the early daysof television archiving you couldn't get four togetherfor bridge.  Until Sara came along, I couldn't play ginrummy.          I will restrict my remarks to television notbecause I don't like video art, but because myexperience has been in television.          Over the past ten years the business oftelevision has gone through some dynamic an sometimescontradictory changes.  It has shrunken, divided,multiplied, conglomerated, expanded, downsized, createdhuge multi-media companies, destroyed at least one hugemultimedia corporation, become international, andopened up local production companies.  The televisionindustry has become splintered into many narrow castingoutlets, each having a small part of the market. However, the market for television collections, whetherwe all them archives, libraries or inventories, hasincreased many times.          This should be good news for the collectionsof television programs and the scholar's wish to studythe   cultural phenomenal wrought by this popular artform.  But most of us who have worked in the field oftelevision archives for many years are uneasy with thisboom and the reuse of old programs for the new narrowcasting channels such as The History Channel, Lifetime,Arts and Entertainment, USA, The Family Channel, TBS,and now even The Food Channel and The Weather Channel,and on and on.           The problem I suspect with all this attentionto the older television programs is that it isephemeral and will dry up and blow away when interestand styles change and another generation's tastedominates the television spectrum.  Because there is nooverall inventory of what television programs exist,who owns the rights to them and what is the physicalcondition of the media they are on, there is noassurance at any organization or many organizations canpick up the job of long term preservation.  The songmay have ended for Name That Tune, but the problems ofpreserving the few remaining programs will linger onand on and on.          I am sure that you've been told many timesthe problems and a huge cost of preserving televisionprograms by copying them to the newest medium.  Themedium du jour changes every five to ten years and thenumber of programs produced increases as well, makingan incredible snowballing of the cost to preserve evensample programs, much less most of the programsproduced.  It appears to be a no-win situation.  It isquite obvious by now that the Library of Congresscannot preserve all that is worthwhile or even notworthwhile of television programs.  The Library hasdone a magnificent job preserving cinema and recordedsound, and would, if given Department of Defense sizeappropriations, do a wonderful job preservingtelevision.  But as generation X would say, let's getreal.  There is a feeling in the wind against largerand larger federal spending for even the most laudableof projects.  So I think the Library of Congress shouldspend its energies, both intellectual and monetary,toward leading the movement to preserve televisionprograms rather than trying to do it by itself, and totake advantage of the current boom in recycling oldprograms for cable distribution.          One flaw in the otherwise beautifullyconceived United States copyright law is the depositrequirement which places the responsibility for long-term preservation in the hands of the Library ofCongress.  What was fine for books, maps, and sheetmusic 200 years ago doesn't work all that well with thetidal wave of films, recordings and now televisionprograms.  Certainly such works should be registeredfor copyright protection; but I think the burden of thecosts of long-term preservation should be borne bythose who stand to profit from the work.            I would like to propose a three-tieredsolution for the preservation of television programs. First, the Library of Congress should obtain anappropriation, not huge, to conduct an exhaustivesurvey of all television programs in the hands ofarchives, networks, studios, and private collectors, inorder to determine the exact size and nature of thepreservation project.  This survey should record thetype, title, series, original broadcast date andsubject matter, along with the condition of theoriginal recording and current copy.  This informationcan be made proprietary for certain producers who wishit to be, but most of it should be shared so thatduplication of programs in different collections can bedetermined.          Second, and I know how difficult this willbe. The Library should obtain a revision of thecopyright law to hold the current holder of rights to atelevision program, not necessarily the originalcopyright holder, responsible for its preservation, inthe most up-to-date format until such time they wish torelinquish their rights to the program.  It would be inthe rights holder's best interest to preserve theirprograms while they can make a profit, and would beonly fitting that some of these profits go to the long-term preservation of their programs and return forcopyright protection.           At that point the third phase of my proposalwould start.  If an owner of rights to a televisionprogram decides that there is no more revenue to bemade from it and wishes to relinquish those rights,then they may be transferred to any one of dozens ofnon-profit archives for permanent retention.  Therelease of ownership rights would also carry with it anappropriate donation of funds from the rights owners tothe receiving archive to support the preservation ofthe program.  In other words, part of the profitsreceived from the ownership of the rights to a programwould serve to assure its long-term preservation.            The Library of Congress would be the overseerof this system.  Nothing would prevent museums bycontract and the Library of Congress by copyrightdeposit from accepting copies of television programs tomaintain adequate study collections.  Indeed I hopethat these institutions will collect by deposit thoseprograms which will not have a profitable future, ifonly by saving a few samples.  Programs fitting thiscategory would probably be the soap operas and talkshows.          My remarks today have not touched on theimportant areas of news and documentary materials, bothprograms and out-takes, and local televisionproduction.  This is not because these areas don'tshare any of the same problems as nationallydistributed television entertainment programs.  Inparticular, national and local news and documentaryproduction suffers from their sheer size and thereduced possibility of profiting from the retention ofthese materials.  The large networks, both cable andbroadcast, have reached an economic equilibrium withtheir news archives, making them pay for themselves byreusing this material and their own productions andlicensing yet to other production companies.  Thisequilibrium might be upset as the cost of preservingever-increasing collections becomes unbearable.  Butfor now it does not suffer.          Local television production, however, isanother matter.  It is the most endangered species ofall the forms of television material.  The economicsituation in most local television markets will notsupport sophisticated archival handling andpreservation.  But, if these programs and the relatedout-takes are not preserved somehow, much of thenation's history of the past 50 years will beirretrievably lost.  I have only to mention the seriesEyes on the Prize with its heavy reliance on localtelevision stations' film collections to make thispoint.          There is no easy answer to the problems oflocal television archives, but the local and regionalrepositories of television station's material would behelped by an educational campaign to dissuade localstation owners that the new age of multimedia andworldwide web will make them millionaires.  Theproduction value of local television material ismarginal so that the station owners should donate therights to their material to local archives for them toeek out what little potential for money there is inorder to defray costs of preservation.          Station owners should be more public spiritedand give grants of money for the local archive forpreserving the history of their community.  But far toooften the local station is controlled by a distantcorporation which is concerned more with thestockholder equity than community memory.          I wish I had an easy answer to this lastdilemma, but the only one that comes to mind is massivegrants of money to local and regional archives tosupport their efforts towards long-term preservation oflocal television, and I am not saying about thathappening.  One way of easing some of the pressure onlocal archives would be the public subsidization ofregional preservation laboratories where localtelevision could be transferred to the newest media atlow cost.          Thank you for listening to my thoughts andfor addressing this very important issue in thecultural history of our nation.          MR. MURPHY:  Thank you.          David?          MR. FRANCIS:  Well Sam, thank you very much. I'm glad the last contribution included somerecommendations even though I fear that--          MR. SURATT:  I understand.          MR. FRANCIS:  --as the organization requiredto implement them--you've given us a pretty difficulttask.          I've always been surprised that theInternational Federation of Television Archives did notattract more members in North America, particularly theUnited States, because although you can't do a lot withan international organization, I think they do helppeople understand why we are preserving televisionprograms and why this is an important issue.  The otherthing it does very well is provide a training.  Theidea of having the Congress one year and a trainingsession the other is extremely good.  But I've neverunderstood why it didn't seem to attract as many members here as one would expect, given the amount oftelevision in the States?          MR. SURATT:  Well, it has to do with thenature of commercial television in the United States. Number one, most of the European archives not only havenews, but they  have all of their entertainmentprograms; whereas the United States, most of thearchives of entertainment are in the Hollywood studiosvaults, that is, anything produced after 1968 orthereabouts.  So there was less interest in the threenetworks at that point, now there are more networks, inbelonging to the international organization, and thestudios I think were essentially excluded by the termsof membership in FIAT.             But this doesn't mean there wasn't anyinterest in the United States for the concept ofpreserving.  There however was very little interest inthe concept of training.  Which I can't explain.          MR. FRANCIS:  And you don't think thatperhaps an attempt to encourage more organizations tojoin FIAT would actually help, to get an understandingparticularly within the major companies of theimportance of television preservation, and show whatwas being done elsewhere in the world?          MR. SURATT:  I would hope that perhaps AMIAcan move into that area that has left a gapinternationally and I certainly have made approaches toFIAT to amend their by-laws to make either groupmemberships to FIAT available or some lower level,because it's a very expensive organization to belongto.          MS. MEYERSON:  I think they have recentlytried to make it easier for more organizations to join,or they're in the process of revising the by-laws toget a larger group, especially in this country.          MR. MURPHY:  Mona?            MS. JIMENEZ:  As people that have beeninvolved in FIAT and AMIA, and someone who's kind ofnew to those forums, I know that as a media arts personthat I feel that our field comes to these issues withexpertise about how the works, at least our particularworks were produced, and what kind of cultural andhistorical context, that we know how to use videocameras and what the steps of production are and whatsome of the language is, just commonly used language inproduction that can be helpful in for instancedescribing the works and cataloging.           I think that I do find though that there area number of different sort of separate groups that areinvolved.  The symposium that's coming up at the BayArea Video Coalition is more to do with conservatorsand scientists and engineers and it seems like AMIA ismore to do with archivists, and I'm just wondering ifthere's a sense that we can bring sort of everyone togather to work out some of the problems, particularlythe cataloging--the physical and intellectual accessquestions I guess.  If it's possible or desirable to dothat or if we do have to kind of work in a lot ofdifferent forums.          MS. MEYERSON:  Well, I think and that's whatI said, we do have these larger organizations and weneed those.  But I think that if we had-- either of thelarger organizations can branch off and have localchapters which I know the Special Libraries Associationis very active local chapters, and that's apossibility.  Then you would belong to the local, youwould go to the annual meeting and you would do thesame things you're doing, but the local chapters wouldaddress the people locally in your area and all oftheir problems, and you would have meetings.  I thinkthat's really important, because as I felt lonely 20years ago, I think there are many archives that arelonely now.  They don't even know about AMIA.  I meanI've spoken to people, archivists and small groups, whodon't--I send them literature--they don't know.  So Ithink we have to try to find a way to get the news outand to have more local meetings.          MR. LINDNER:  Both of you have very longcareers working for major networks and I'm kind ofcurious, because it seems to me that one of thesituations, one of the reasons we're in the situationwe're in now was because 20 years ago people weren'ttaught how to take care of the medium in the firstplace.  And I don't frankly see much of a change rightnow.  I don't see that there's a major change in termsof trying to educate people.            But I'm wondering whether the networks havetraining in terms of teaching people who work there nowon how to deal with media properly so that it does lastlonger, and if they do, whether this can be applied tothe industry at whole, particularly film students andpeople who are just coming into the industry?          MR. SURATT:  I don't think there's--at leastI'm not aware of any formal training within thenetworks.  There is, however, if you're working withinyour individual network, there is a very close relianceupon producers, editors and archivists.  If you can'tfind what the need or if you don't return it properlyor if it is not properly handled, then the next persondown the line--and it's often a very strong, shall wesay rapping of knuckles if something happened.           I think one thing, at least at CBS news, itwas very good, was that many of the tape editors oftoday started out as film and tape librarians, so theyknew what the problems were and from the ground up. They're also a very vocal group and they'll let theeditors know if they're treating something badly.          But no, there's no formal training that I cansay.  Maybe there was at ABC.          MS. MEYERSON:  No.  I had always thought weshould have a training videotape to train the peoplewho worked in the library area on how to handle tapeand give them basic information.  But we never did it.          MR. SURATT:  There is one videotape availablethrough FIAT--          MS. MEYERSON:  Yes.          MR. SURATT:  --which was produced--well, inconjunction with Austrian television and BBC.  I couldget you the information on that, I'll send it to Bill,if you don't have it or--          MS. MEYERSON:  It was after seeing that thatI wanted to produce one.  I thought it was excellent.          MR. SURATT:  It was very well done.  I meanit could be updated, it's a couple, three years oldnow, but.          MR. LINDNER:  Is this sold or readilyavailable, or just for FIAT members?          MR. SURATT:  I think it comes at cost fromFIAT.          MS. MEYERSON:  And there is an Englishversion.          MR. SURATT:  Yes, there's an English version,a French version, probably a Spanish version.  I don'tknow, I'll find that out.          MR. FRANCIS:  One thing, is the FIATPreservation Manual still available?  What was itcalled, do you remember?          MR. SURATT:  The Panorama?          MR. FRANCIS:  Yes.          MR. SURATT:  You know, I don't know.  Becausethey were reconsidering reissuing it.  See, it was theBBC that published the English version and ENApublished the French version, and ERTV in Spainpublished the Spanish version.  So it's hard gettingall that together again.          MR. MURPHY:  Let me ask one question.  Sam,based on your experience and activity in FIAT, can youmake some generalizations about the difference betweenthe treatment and support of television archives inEurope as compared to the United States?          MR. SURATT:  They're two main differences. One good and one bad.  One, they have a lot of moneybecause they're mostly government supported.  Orthey're tax supported, in the case of the BBC they havea tax on television.  The bad part was that theyactually started later with the newer forms and startedlater recognizing the problems inherent in video asopposed to film, and even in many cases they didn'tbegin to preserve television film, not cinema film,until quite late.  So some of the new archives, that isthe ones who realized late but then spent a lot ofmoney on it are really wonderful places.          For instance, the Austrian BroadcastingArchive is beautifully done, their computer system iswonderful, the storage is great; but they didn't reallystart until about ten years ago.  Those who startedearly are a little outdated and antiquated.                 But the main difference is that there's a lotmore money put into the archiving business.  Now thismay change as more things are made available for cable,I don't know.          MR. MURPHY:  I think that brings ourdiscussion  to a conclusion.  I want to thank you allfor your statements.  We've heard some very goodstatements today; and thanks to those in the audiencewho came to witness the proceedings.  Thanks again.          (Whereupon, the proceeding was adjourned.) 

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