PTV Digital Archive

General
Why is it important to preserve public television programs?
“The impact of television on our culture is. . . indescribable. There’s a certain sense in which it is nearly as important as the invention of printing.” — Carl Sandburg
Worldwide, more than 30 million hours of unique television programming are broadcast every [...]

AMIA – Association of Moving Image Archivists
In addition to its website at http://www.amianet.org/, AMIA has produced an extensive study of locally-based television archives. Local Television: A Guide to Saving Our Heritage examines television preservation at local stations through a collection of case studies:

Local Television: A Guide to Saving Our Heritage
Case Study: KSTP and the Minnesota [...]

Organizational Partners in this Project

Preserving Digital Public Television is funded by the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) of the Libary of Congress, and is a partnership between:

Thirteen/WNET – TV, New York – A major producer of national programming for public television and lead institution for Preserving Digital Public Television.
http://www.thirteen.org/index.php
WGBH – [...]

The partners involved in Preserving Digital Public Television have participated in a number of events, and have given support to several conferences devoted to preserving television history.
In June, 2006, WNET hosted Culture, Commerce, and Public Media, which attracted nearly 100 people from commercial, academic, public broadcasting, and non-commercial organizations.
Past Events
April 11-14, 2007
PBS Technology Conference
Las [...]

The key is designing a preservation repository that the public television system can afford to maintain and use. Our tasks are aimed at designing a model repository based on deciding criteria both for what will go into the repository and how it will function.

Completing an inventory of our at-risk materials to prepare for selection;
Reviewing best [...]

How to Preserve Digital TV

“By nature and necessity, public broadcasting is a hodgepodge of media types and formats. A documentary might include moving and still images, speeches and voice-overs, sound effects, or a song. Children’s programming might include a combination of live action, cartoons, musical numbers, and kaleidoscopic effects. Source material for any [...]

Wikinews has an interview with Paul Gerhardt of the BBC Creative Archive. Two quotes are especially interesting:
“We want people to make full use of this content, whether they cut and paste it or whether they share it, and we completely accept that we’ve got a bit of a contradiction at the moment by saying [...]

The NYT reports:
“On Saturday Brazil’s government announced that Radiobrás, its official news agency, would make its archives and all its future reporting available under a Creative Commons license. The site housing the collection, which includes 150,000 photographs, was designed with free open-source software.”

The INA is setting a new standard for making television archives publicly accessible.
From the IHT:
One of the world’s leaders in digital audio and video has opened up its vault to the public, putting thousands of hours of radio and television recordings on the Internet for free.
Historic footage of Charles de Gaulle, Marc Chagall, [...]

From The Daily Yomiuri:
The entire NHK archive of more than 550,000 television programs should be made available on the Internet, an advisory panel for Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Heizo Takenaka agreed last week, prior to a final report to be announced later this month.
To achieve this goal, the ministry should lift the ceiling [...]