The Library of Congress: Preserving Television History
An inside look at the Library of Congress' Motion Picture and Television Reading Room.
(Published by Creative Planet on TVIndustry.com)

WASHINGTON -- The Library of Congress Motion Picture and Television Reading Room is not housed in the historic Thomas Jefferson building, with its gilded rotunda, renaissance fountain and marble columns. Instead, what is arguably the world's largest collection of television programs and motion pictures has its headquarters on the third floor of the decidedly less historic James Madison building on a hall that is chronically under construction.

Entering the reading room is like entering any community college or public library in the country, there are dozens of bookshelves, a few workstations and some old movie posters tacked to the wall. In a backroom off the main reading room are the week's acquisitions from the Copyright Office two floors up--six to ten mail bins filled to the rim with video cassettes, 16 mm, and even 35 mm prints.

"'All My Children'—we only collect a sampling of soap operas, a Tom Petty tape, '1900 House,'" Moving Image Curator Dr. Mike Mahon rattles off the selections as he tosses video cassettes back into the bins. "Over there is 'Gladiator' and in that box is 'Me, Myself and Irene.'" The latter film appears perilously close to sliding off its pile and spilling its reels onto the tile floor.

While the motion picture and television reading room may be less than impressive, its mission, with regards to television, is expansive.

"The mission of the Library of Congress is to collect the depth and breadth of American history and culture," Mahon explains. "The motion picture division has that same mandate. So we try to collect both broadly and deeply in every aspect of American television. Our mission is to collect everything essentially."

That mission has led the division to collect more that 350,000 television programs since it first acquired a 1949 copy of a "Hopalong Cassidy" show. The collection's holdings date back to 1946 and contain every possible variety of programming imaginable.

To "collect everything" ever put on television, the library uses both "passive collecting" and "active collecting," according to Mahon.

Unlike films, most television programs are not registered with the Copyright Office when they are originally aired, although they are registered if they are ever sold in syndication, on video or DVD. Once the program is registered for a copyright, it automatically begins to make its way down to the library and onto the piles.

"In general, we get most shows (through the copyright office)," Mahon said. "I mean you can go down the list of shows that are in primetime now and we're going to get copies of all of those. At some point they're going to go into syndication."

However, to catch any programs that might slip through the cracks, the library also convenes a yearly working group which contacts studios and networks seeking out certain programming. The Library also has agreements with PBS and the Vanderbilt Television News Archive to collect tapes of all the evening news programs.

While the system works well for collecting a large volume of programming, the shows come in a nightmarish variety of formats, Mahon said. Librarians and researchers are regularly confronted with programs on 3/4 inch pneumatic tape, 16mm and 35 mm prints, VHS tape, Beta tape and, now, digital and high definition formats.

The variety of formats not only makes researching television difficult, it also makes storing and maintaining the collection laborious. To help end the confusion, Mahon wants to work with the networks on streamlining the system.

"What we would like to do at some point is make an arrangement with the networks to tape programs off the air," he said. "That way we could control what we record and what format we record it in... Ultimately, what I believe is going to happen is, as more and more producers and networks move to digital feeds, that we'll be able to take in those feeds."

The motion picture and television collection is not available to the average tourist, in order to access the collection, and all of the library's holdings, you must register with the library staff and present proof that you are working on a "research project that could eventually lead to published material," Mahon said. Under these rules, the holdings are generally accessed by producers, academics studying the television medium and documentary filmmakers.

"We get a lot of people working on documentaries—independent researchers who are maybe doing research for Ken Burns or A&E and they're looking for clips," Mahon said. "In general we really discourage people who want to joyride and treat this like the biggest Blockbuster in the world."

Qualified researchers—and it's not that hard to qualify—who want to access the collection should plan on spending sometime in Washington, as Mahon rarely lets television items leave the collection and some film clips may take up to two weeks to get to the reading room, depending on where they are stored. The actual collection is housed in several locations throughout the surrounding suburbs of Washington, not in the actual Library of Congress buildings.

While accessing the collection can be a pain now, the library is in the process of moving the entire motion picture and television collection to a former fallout shelter in Culpepper, Va. in order to make viewing the collection simpler. As part of that move, which will be completed in 2003, copies of some of the collection will be placed in "huge digital silos" so clips can be shipped electronically between Culpepper and Washington.

"It'll all be closed circuit, but you'll be able to sit at a work station and you will be able to call for this digital feed to come to you from Culpepper," Mahon said. "That's the first step—and that's a big first step. But then at some point we'll be able to deliver this information to workstations around the world...But again you have to be very careful about copyright restrictions."

In fact, the Library of Congress is extremely careful about protecting intellectual property rights and any researcher who wants to obtain a copy of a television show in the collection must secure the rights from the original copyright holder. The library has a fulltime staff dedicated to facilitating that process.

As television moves forward into digital transmission, interactivity and high-definition formats, the library must keep up. It is in the process of updating its equipment to ensure that programming can be viewed in its intended format. The collection administrators, including Mahon, are also in the beginning stages of gathering television and film programming designed specifically for the Internet, a process that is proving to be a daunting task.

"As films and other things are produced strictly for the Internet, we want to collect that as well, but it becomes very difficult," Mahon said. "There's so much of it that we're going to be forced to be selective.”

In this, the 500 channel and beyond universe of television, Mahon's task is monumental. To create a complete record of all that the motion picture industry has ever had to offer seems impossible, to do it for television and the programming now available on the Internet may be futile, but Mahon is up for the challenge.

"We have a pretty good idea of how we're going to preserve film. We've been doing it for a long time, we know what it means to preserve a film," he said. "But to preserve a television show is a much, much more difficult proposition because of the variety of formats and the fact that video tape doesn't last nearly as long as motion picture film. It’s a real struggle for us."

Perhaps in the future, as television finally makes the move to digital, Mahon will get his wish and the library will collect television shows as easily as college kids swap MP3s. But until then he and his staff will continue to wade through piles and piles of tapes, building the national collection.