KXAS donating early news footage/scripts for preservation & digitization

[easttxtv 7]

http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/NBC-5-Donates-Historical-Film-Library-to-University-of-North-Texas-233318551.html

http://www.nbcdfw.com/profiles/local/DFWThe-Portal-to-Texas-History-287968361.html

 

The NBC station has announced the gift of 10,000 reels of film from news coverage from the 1950s through the 1970s, as well as over 200,000 pages of accompanying scripts, to the University of North Texas library archive. NBCUniversal is also helping to fund work so that UNT can restore and digitize the newsreels and scripts so they can be made available online. It is estimated that the content, once digitized, will encompass 2.2 petabytes of data.

 

The University of North Texas website has started a section with information about the KXAS collection, as well as samples of already-digitized video and scripts, at: http://www.library.unt.edu/collections/special-collections/kxasnbc-5

 

(It is not known whether the UNT collection will include footage related to coverage of the Kennedy assassination, as KXAS previously donated film and content about that to the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas.)

[10Viewer 319]

Very nice!

[ChesapeakeTV 310]

Kudos to them for donating it! Will be interesting to see what the full archive contains.

[Weeters 1811]

WTMJ donated their film library to UW-Milwaukee in the early 2000's, and it's basically sat there since. I think they may have cheaply made telecine-d "access copies" on tape, but that's it.

 

I look forward to seeing what KXAS and UNT manage to do with all this.

[rkolsen 1678]

I wonder if they "donated" it so they wouldn't have to foot the entire bill for digitizing all of it. I do wonder if the stations that donate their archives if they will have access to the originals or a higher quality video if they need footage for a report. From what I've seen in the past the copies that organizations make available for searching online are usually lower resolution proxy files.

 

I remember a year or two WSB in Atlanta digitized their archives minus the scripts. WSB was the first TV station to use an advanced form of voice recognition software which made searchable scripts. They archived over 40,000 hours of content dating back to the 1950s which took three years to complete.

[Weeters 1811]

 

I wonder if they "donated" it so they wouldn't have to foot the entire bill for digitizing all of it.

 

I'm pretty sure this is exactly why they did it.

 

WTMJ's archive took 6 years to "process" but the listing on the website says that only some footage has been transferred to videotape. Only a very limited amount of footage was digitized.

[bixpchiphead 105]

In Pittsburgh, the KDKA TV archives have been housed in the Hillman Library of The University of Pittsburgh for several decades, going back to the station's earliest days (WDTV).

 

in San Francisco, the KPIX archives are housed at San Francisco State University.

 

Unsure how much of the content of either collection has been digitized.

[10Viewer 319]

WBNS has been putting a lot of old reports on their website. They have a huge archive from what I understand.