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The Complicated Preservation of the Television Heritage in a Digital Era

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Abstract

Television as an electronic audiovisual mass medium has always been difficult to collect and to preserve. The daily routines of broadcasting institutions have hardly promoted attempts of strategic-objectified collecting. Under the influence of a cultural inferiority of television in general public perception, facilities dedicated to the collection and archiving of this rather new medium have struggled to find ways of coping with its specific challenges. Television as ethereal-volatile as well as material-complex medium seemed to contradict the conventions of institutional archiving that evolved over centuries with a dominant focus on written documents. As an electronic medium, television always depended on technological auxiliaries to endure over time, either by means of film, magnetic tapes, digital versatile or hard discs and playback devices. In the complexity of its material legacy, broadcasting institutions could not always adequately guarantee the collection of televised programming over the past decades. This chapter discusses key issues of television heritage management with a focus on the technical dependencies of long-term preservation of audiovisual broadcasting history. Beyond that, the chapter asks how digitalization promises solutions for the many challenges television preservation faces in the light of material decay and the apparent contradiction between the ostensible omnipresence of media and the ephemerality of broadcasting.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The qualitative in-depth interviews quoted in this chapter were conducted as part of a larger study on television heritage management in North America and Germany, published in the German language in [26]. The sample includes interviews with the following experts and their institutions who are quoted in this chapter (in alphabetical order): Ruta Abolins, Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection (Athens, Georgia, USA); Don Adams, CBC (Toronto, Canada); Daniel Berger, Museum of Broadcast Communications (Chicago, Illinois, USA); Howard Besser, New York University (New York, NY, USA); Susanna Betzel, RTL Television (Cologne, Germany); Thomas Beutelschmidt, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (Berlin, Germany); Steve Bryant, BFI National Archive (Berkhamsted, UK); Axel Bundenthal, ZDF Television (Mainz, Germany); Kathy Christensen, CNN (Atlanta, Georgia, USA); Glenn Clatworthy, PBS (Arlington, Virginia, USA); Dan Einstein, UCLA Film and Television Archive (Los Angeles, California, USA); Wolfgang Ernst, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (Berlin, Germany); Laurie Friedman, FOX News (New York, NY, USA); Doug Gibbons, Paley Center for Media (New York, NY, USA); Dina Gunderson, CNN (Atlanta, Georgia, USA); Michael Harms, SWR (Baden-Baden, Germany); Bettina Hasselbring, Bayerischer Rundfunk (Munich, Germany); Hans Hauptstock, WDR (Cologne, Germany); Michele Hilmes, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (Madison, Wisconsin, USA); Geoffrey Hopkinson, CBC (Toronto, Canada); Chuck Howell, Library of American Broadcasting (College Park, Maryland, USA); Henry Jenkins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA); Joel Kanoff, ABC (New York, NY, USA); John Koshel, NBC (New York, NY, USA); Heiko Kröger, NDR (Hamburg, Germany); Peter Paul Kubitz, Deutsche Kinemathek (Berlin, Germany); Sam Kula, Consultant (Ottawa, Canada); Bary Lord, Lord Cultural Resources (Toronto, Canada); Mike Mashon, Library of Congress (Culpeper, Virginia, USA); Olaf Moschner, RTL (Cologne, Germany); Horace Newcomb, University of Georgia (Athens, Georgia, USA); Dietmar Preißler, Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Bonn, Germany); Mark Quigley, UCLA Film and Television Archive (Los Angeles, California, USA); Peter Schwirkmann, Deutsche Kinemathek (Berlin, Germany); Ron Simon, Paley Center for Media (New York, NY, USA); Lynn Spigel, Northwestern University (Chicago, Illinois, USA); Hans-Gerhard Stülb, DRA (Wiesbaden, Germany); Mardiros Tavit, ProSiebenSat.1 (Berlin/Munich, Germany); Lynne Teather, University of Toronto (Toronto, Canada); Robert Thompson, Syracuse University (Syracuse, NY, USA); Gerlinde Waz, Deutsche Kinemathek (Berlin, Germany).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Zentrum für Medien-, Kommunikations- und Informationsforschung (ZeMKI), University ofBremen, Bremen, Germany

    Leif Kramp

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  1. Leif Kramp
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Correspondence to Leif Kramp .

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  1. Group of Computer Architecture Faculty 3 - Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Cornelia S. Große

  2. Group of Computer Architecture Faculty 3 - Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Rolf Drechsler

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Kramp, L. (2020). The Complicated Preservation of the Television Heritage in a Digital Era. In: Große, C., Drechsler, R. (eds) Information Storage. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19262-4_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19262-4_8

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