Kentucky Public Television Digitizes The Past

July 7, 2004
Summary used with permission from: www.current.org

Kentucky Educational Television (KET) recently became the first public TV operation to commit itself to digitizing its entire video archive.

The state-owned Kentucky network began transferring its video archive to hard-drive storage in April, making backups on DVDs. It plans to digitize all of its 3/4-inch and 1-inch tapes—6,549 tapes running 4,380 hours—by September 2005. Later it will do the same with newer footage stored on Beta SP tapes.

The idea began with Virginia Fox, who retired as KET executive director in 2002 (Ms. Fox is currently the Secretary of Kentucky's Education Cabinet). Paul Stackhouse, the network’s director of Web and multimedia and the project’s chief technical consultant, says Fox recognized that KET’s oldest videos were “potentially in peril.” Fortunately, an anonymous donor put up $300,000 toward preserving the archive. A matching grant from Louisville’s James Graham Brown Foundation gave KET a $600,000 project budget.

Part of that sum was used to bring in Lisa Carter, an audio/video archivist at the University of Kentucky, as project manager in March 2003. While Carter is nationally known in archiving circles, she was less so among KET brass who were attending a Boston conference when they learned about her. “We had to go to Massachusetts to get a referral for someone who worked across the street,” Stackhouse says.

In the project’s planning phase, KET organized and assessed the condition of tapes and made decisions about format, storage media and vendors. It quickly became apparent that no single vendor could handle the whole project, from cataloging and ingestion to indexing and storage, says Carter, who will return to the university at the completion of the project. KET hoped to make archived material readily accessible by converting audio to searchable text by using speech-recognition software and other advanced indexing technology. However, Carter says that the few software companies specializing in video digitization offer “totally different packages that do totally different things, but none does everything.”

KET ultimately brought in the PPS Group to handle the project. The digital video production company, based in Cincinnati, works on site from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily to process the content. PPS is essentially learning how to integrate the necessary software as it goes, says Carter.

See full story here: http://www.current.org/tech/tech0410ketpreserve.shtml

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