AMIA’s Local Television Project

This article describes the Association of Moving Image Archivists’s (AMIA’s) local television project—how it was formulated, its goals, and lessons learned from it. It was one of the first projects AMIA members undertook with outside funding to address issues of concern to the moving image community.

Much of our nation’s cultural heritage has been captured by local television. From local news coverage to children’s programming to arts and entertainment, local television provides a glimpse of our country’s communities. As Librarian of Congress James Billington opined in 1997,

television affects our lives from birth to death. Most Americans inform and entertain themselves through it. . . . Sadly, we have not yet sought to preserve this powerful medium in anything like a serious or systematic manner. At present, chance determines what television programs survive. Future scholars will have to rely on incomplete evidence when they assess the achievements and failures of our culture.¹

During the 1980s and 1990s, a number of public archives and a few television stations began saving collections of local television recordings, films, and videotapes, which were deteriorating and being discarded at an alarming rate. The volume of materials created and therefore in existence from daily TV shows—particularly local news—was overwhelming to stations. From the stations’ point of view, tossing it was often easier than saving it. However, much of twentieth-century culture has been documented on TV. As archivists, witnessing the destruction of these recordings of our history felt very wrong.

Professionals within AMIA discussed local television archive challenges that needed to be addressed to stem the losses, to preserve what remained, and to protect newly created material. Several conferences, studies, and meetings, such as one in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1987, outlined the problems and called for action. In 1997, the Library of Congress (LOC) issued a report titled A Study of the Current State of American Television and Video Preservation. AMIA members Karan Sheldon (Northeast Historic Film) and Eddie Richmond (University of California, Los Angeles [UCLA]) were cochairs of an AMIA Committee on the U.S. National Moving Image Preservation Plans, which was formed in response to the LOC report. AMIA wanted to implement projects to address issues mentioned in the report.

Karan Sheldon turned to members of AMIA’s News and Documentary Interest Group to develop a project to solve specific problems related to local TV. With approval of the AMIA board, an ad hoc task force called the Local Television Case Studies/Symposium Planning Group was formed to map a strategy to address the problems of preserving local television. A small core group of committed project participants formed, including Bonnie Wilson and me as cochairs, Ruta Abolins, Steve Davidson, Lynn Farnell, Richard Fauss, Linda Giannecchini (also representing the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences [NATAS]), Greg Lukow, Sara Meyerson, Karan Sheldon, Linda Tadic, David Weiss, and Helene Whitson. After a year of meeting at conferences and brainstorming ideas, the team formulated a project with three phases.

Formulating the Project

The task force’s main challenge was to develop a way to raise awareness nationally about the importance of preserving these valuable materials and to stop the destruction of local television collections. Although the task force had been meeting at AMIA conferences and electronically since 1997, project planning began in earnest with a trip to Athens, Georgia, in April 1999, to the house of Linda Tadic, then director of the Peabody Collection at the University of Georgia. After working for two days and hashing out ideas of how to attack the problem at hand, a project was designed to solve the challenges.

The group felt that it was important to bring archivists and local television-producing entities together to discuss issues that affect the preservation of local television in the United States. There was a strong feeling that the content creators—the television stations (particularly the local ones)—needed to understand why it was important preserve this material and how best to do so. Without that support and understanding, the project would fall short of its goal. The task force worked on the structure, work plan, timeline...