Copyright term, film labeling, and film preservation legislation : hearings before the Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, One Hundred Fourth Congress, first session, on H.R. 989, H.R. 1248, and H.R. 1734 ... June 1 and July 13, 1995 (1996)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

438 reliable format for holding film information. As noted in Recommendation 3.2, saving the original film artifact remains a basic archival principle. New preservation technologies offer opportunities to break through the current impasse, but they need to be approached cautiously. The very speed of technological evolution reinforces the apparently oldfashioned importance of saving film as film. Television and Video Preservation Motion pictures represent, as testimony and written comments last year pointed out, only a portion of America's moving image heritage. Since the advent of television broadcasting, archives have moved rapidly into collecting 16mm newsfilm, kinescopes of early broadcasts, and videotape— often rescuing material thrown away by television stations. As video has become more portable and inexpensive, many organizations, including most U.S. government agencies, have switched from film to video for internal documentation and educational outreach. These organizations are now sending videotapes, many in obsolete formats, to archives. There is little up-to-date information on the problems facing American television and video preservation. Merely documenting the size of national collections is a formidable task. The most recent survey, completed eight years ago by the National Center for Film and Video Preservation at the American Film Institute, counted among 28 responding archives over 125,000 hours of video in a range of formats— 1/2-inch and 3/4-inch cassette; 1/2-inch, one-inch, and two-inch open reel— as well as millions of feet of newsfilm and filmed television programs. To judge from the popularity of video and the evolution of digital-tape formats, holdings are undoubtedly much larger today. Recommendation 3.8: Television and Video Preservation Study Conduct a national study on the state of preservation of American television and video materials. The Library of Congress will seek Congressional authorization for a national study of television and video preservation, similar to that completed in 1993 for American film. This study will cover technical problems, current practices in public and commercial archives, the concerns of copyright owners, and the access needs of educators. The Library will request funding for both the study and development of a national television and video preservation plan under the framework of the American Television and Radio Archive (ATRA) legislation. 10 Redefining Film Preservation