The Archivability of Television: Essays on Preservation and Perseverance - Paperback

by Lauren Bratslavsky (Editor), Elizabeth Peterson (Editor), Caroline Frick (Contribution by)

This anthology critically evaluates archives and archival processes that collect, order, and preserve elements of television as historically, culturally, socially, politically, and economically significant material.

What do we know about how television moved from ephemeral broadcasts and mounds of paperwork documenting bureaucratic and creative processes to become historical material housed in archives? This book's guiding principles are to interrogate where television as historical material "lives" and to collect the stories of some ways television preservation has been and continues to be deeply circumstantial and idiosyncratic.

Bringing together work by academics, archivists, and practitioners, the book offers insights into the archival processes that confer television programs with historical value. With a focus on television's archival spaces, the book contributes more broadly to theories, histories, and practices of archiving. Likewise, the theories and questions about archives provide insights into the specificities of the medium, the relations between technologies and culture, the political economy of the culture industries, and the minutiae of television's "place" in American society.

Author Biography

Lauren Bratslavsky (Editor)
LAUREN BRATSLAVSKY is an Associate Professor at Illinois State University's School of Communication. Her research related to mass media and archives is published in American Journalism, The Moving Image, Film & History, and in the inaugural issue of Journal of 20th Century Media History. She is also involved with the Library of Congress's Radio Preservation Task Force.

Elizabeth Peterson (Editor)
ELIZABETH PETERSON is a Digital Collections Librarian at the University of Oregon. She has published articles in The Moving Image, Film History, Oregon Historical Quarterly, and Iluminace. She is the author of Tribal Libraries in the United States: A Directory of American Indian and Alaska Native Facilities.