Friday, May 14, 1999

Television Archive Hopes to Digitize Newscasts for Scholars' Use By VINCENT KIERNAN Washington The world's foremost archive of televised news broadcasts is trying to develop a plan for digitizing its holdings so that researchers can watch recorded broadcasts via the Internet. The proposed system would assure that digitized versions of broadcasts were delivered only to individual scholars, and that the broadcasts could not be copied. Planning is only in the early stages, and no schedule has been established for providing Internet access to the collection, Vanderbilt University's Television News Archives. But objections by the broadcast networks, which own the copyright to the material, may threaten the idea. The archive holds videotapes of more than 30,000 individual network-news broadcasts and more than 9,000 hours of other news programming. Currently, scholars can visit Vanderbilt to view the videotapes or borrow videotapes through the mail. Jeff Carr, vice-chancellor for university relations and general counsel for Vanderbilt, says that using the Internet to distribute the recordings is allowed under a 1978 copyright-law revision that permits the archiving of televised broadcasts. "We simply would be using 21st-century technology to do what we have been doing all along," says Mr. Carr. Although details are still evolving, says John Lynch, associate director of the archive, the proposed system would be designed to make sure that digitized copies of broadcasts were delivered only to individual scholars and not audiences of several people. For example, scholars probably would not be permitted to watch the broadcasts at their own computers, Mr. Lynch says. Instead, they might be limited to watching broadcasts from specific computers in their universities' libraries, he says. Librarians would monitor the use of those terminals to make sure that the archived broadcasts were not being viewed by groups. As a further copyright safeguard, the software used by scholars would not permit them to record a copy of a video, but only watch it as it was transmitted from Vanderbilt. However, such an arrangement may not satisfy the broadcast networks, which have never been entirely happy about the existence of the archive. Josie J. Thomas, vice-president for business affairs at CBS News, says that delivering archived video over the Internet -- even to individual scholars -- would be a retransmission of the original program. "Making the program available via the Internet would require a license," she says. She will not say, however, how much CBS would charge for such a license. Mr. Lynch says that a modest licensing fee could be passed along to individual scholars. He says universities could be charged a fee for their scholars' use of the archive, and part of that fee could be paid to the networks. Potentially more troubling than the license fee, he says, is the possibility that a network could refuse to license the use of some of the archived broadcasts. Because some scholars study the archived holdings to track changes in society, barring the use of a portion of the archive would effectively "change history," he says. The system he envisions would depend on the development of new, high-speed computer networks, such as those being championed by the Internet 2 consortium of universities and companies, says Donald A. Cox, the Internet 2 coordinator for Vanderbilt. Mr. Cox and Mr. Lynch demonstrated the feasibility of the digital delivery of archived video during an exhibition here last month that was part of a meeting of Internet 2 institutions. For the demonstration, Vanderbilt digitized six videotaped news broadcasts. Digitizing the archive's entire holdings, however, would be a formidable task. Mr. Cox estimates that it would take nine people working full time for a year, and that storing the digitized broadcasts would require 600 terabytes of disk space. That's the equivalent of more than 400 million floppy disks. The digitizing project would be heavily dependent on grants and gifts. The archive hopes that a company will donate hardware to the project as a showcase for its products' capabilities, Mr. Cox says. Consequently, the archive has not yet chosen specific technology. "We're very technology-agnostic right now," he adds. In any event, current technologies for transmitting video via the Internet are insufficient for the scholarly study of television broadcasts, says Mr. Lynch. Scholars often need to scrutinize the televised images closely, but current video technologies produce blurred images in which many details are lost. "They need video as good as you can deliver," says Mr. Lynch. "They really need more than the words."