In their article "Preserving Digital Local News," Robert B. Allen and Kirsten A. Johnson find that there is currently no large scale effort to preserve local television and newspaper news stories. Preserving audio and visual media is hugely problematic, but factoring in an industry that pumps out new material on a daily and even hourly basis, then the problem is even further compounded.
The BBC does have a website devoted to discussion dealing with the preservation of their archive. "We've got about 4 million physical items for TV and radio. That's equivalent to 600,000 hours of TV content and about 350,000 hours of radio. So we're getting very close now to a million hours of material. We also now have a New Media archive, which is keeping a record of the content that goes out on the BBC's websites. We also have large sheet-music collections, we have commercial music collections. We have press cuttings going back 40 years as well. So it's a very large-scale operation." At least we know that large entities such as these are trying to preserve the objects as best as possible until they can digitize them and make them available. However trying to access the online video interviews with their professionals raises yet another problem with video preservation, it's not accessible to everyone! If you dig around on the web at all, you'll find that video from sites made in the U.K. are not generally available outside of the U.K. Alas, we cannot learn from their professionals, but at least we know their onboard with trying to tackle the contents of their archive.
The Library of Congress is of course collecting all things television, and have the largest audiovisual archive in the world. Although initially stored in several different locations, the archive is now being consolidated and a massive, round the clock digitization project is under way.
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/library/challenge/packard.html
http://www.davidconnell.net/fact/loc.html
One great thing we are seeing more and more of though, is education available to the public on how to digitize and preserve their own audiovisual materials. (Example) With the widespread use of this knowledge, we're seeing more and more television clips popping up from personal files on sites such as youtube. Although this may be a copyright issue, it demonstrates that there is a need to preserve this material and puts pressure on entities to move forward quickly with their digitization efforts.
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The idea that people will become the preservers of whatever is of interest to them is interesting. However, we also have to think about the permanence of sites like youtube. there are Information Scientists already studying those issues.
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