Vanderbilt Television News Archive
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| Type | Television Archive |
|---|---|
| Established | August 5, 1968 |
| Collection | |
| Items collected | News broadcasts of United States national television networks |
| Other information | |
| Director | John Lynch |
| Website | www.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu |
The Vanderbilt Television News Archive, founded in August 1968, maintains a library of televised network news programs. It is a unit of the Jean and Alexander Heard Library of Vanderbilt University, a private research university located in Nashville, Tennessee. It is the world's most extensive and complete archive of television news.
The Archive’s collection consists of more than 40,000 hours of video content, including:
Televised coverage of major news events preserved in the Archive's collection includes:
The Archive maintains an on-line database, http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu, of abstracts and catalog records for most of the programs in its collection, which can be browsed or searched by subject, date and network. Individuals may request loans of broadcasts or selected items from the Archive’s collection for reference, study, classroom instruction, and research. Borrowers pay fees for the items loaned to cover the costs of providing this service. The requested items are loaned as DVDs or VHS tapes, which must be returned to the Archive by the end of the loan period. Due to copyright considerations, access to streaming video is available only to a limited audience, and only for certain portions of the collection (currently CNN and NBC). Only individuals associated with sponsoring colleges and universities can view streaming video content. Visitors to the Archive can view all content from the Archive's collection.
The Vanderbilt Television News Archive was founded by Paul Simpson, a Nashville businessman. The mission of the Archive is to equip students and scholars with the tools necessary to both engage with and critique news coverage by making actual copies widely available. According to the official history of the archive written by Simpson, he watched a news program where Timothy Leary recommended that young Americans find themselves by freeing their mind and experimenting with LSD. Leary's comment shocked and appalled Simpson. After watching the program, Simpson wanted to watch the program again to confirm what he had heard. It was through his attempts to locate a recording of the news program that he discovered that news programs were not being preserved anywhere for future generations to access. At the time, networks only preserved news program for two weeks— after which tapes were erased and then reused.
Simpson was also motivated by a 1967 book in which former president of CBS News Fred Friendly was quoted as having said, “for the most part we were . . . just a bunch of old radio hands learning the hard way that cameras need something more than emulsion and light valves to create electronic journalism. The missing ingredients were conviction, controversy and a point of view”. Simpson's experience watching Leary, together with Friendly’s comments, prompted him to think more seriously about the influence of the news on the television audience, particularly within the context of what he perceived to be one-sided news coverage of the Vietnam War that was fueling protest against the war both in the United States and abroad.
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