The digitisation and commercial licensing of local television news as a model for preservation and access: A case study

摘要

Since 2014, the Special Collections Department of the University of North Texas Libraries (UNTL) has worked to digitise over 60 years' worth of historical film and video and provide online digital access to news programming that was originally broadcast under the name WBAP-TV, and later NBC 5/KXAS-TV. Revenue from commercial licensing is expected to contribute an increasingly significant percentage of the funding needed to make the collection fully digitally accessible. This paper looks briefly at the history of the NBC5 news collection and examines the workflows required to prepare film and video for digitisation, perform quality control on digital files, and apply metadata keywords and content description to make footage easier for easily filmmakers to discover online. The paper will also discuss the licensing workflows in place at UNTL and how footage has been licensed for use in a variety of projects.