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Vanderbilt Television News Archive

This guide is intended for Vanderbilt University students. VU students, staff, and faculty authenticated on VUnet can stream the entire collection.

Additional Resources

The following list is a non-exhaustive guide to other sources of archival audiovisual footage:

Archival Resources:

  • The Library of Congress' Moving Image Research Center allows researchers to access the Library's approximately 1.2 million items of moving image material. The collection spans nearly the entire history of cinema and television, and much of the content is available online in the National Screening Room collection. The LOC MIRC also hosts a list of resources for locating moving image related subjects and materials.
  • The American Archive of Public Broadcasting is a collaboration between the Library of Congress and GBH, a Boston-based public broadcasting service, with the mission to to digitally preserve and make accessible public radio and television programming from across the country. To date, over 100,000 historic public broadcasting radio and television programs and original materials have been digitized and preserved, a subset of which is accessible through the organization's online reading room. Additionally, users can search the 2.5 million metadata records that document public radio and television assets.
  • The National Archives holds historical U.S. government documents (federal, congressional, and presidential records) that are created or received by the President and his staff, by Congress, by employees of Federal government agencies, and by the Federal courts in the course of their official duties. The National Archives includes moving picture items,  many of which are viewable on the website. 
  • The Internet Archive began in 1996 by archiving internet web pages, but today contains millions of other archived materials such as books, audio, videos, imagines, and software programs. The Internet Archive's TV News Archive began archiving television programs in late 2000 and today contains a searchable index of select television news broadcasts from 2009 to the present.
  • The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation archives Canadian and International footage from its English Network holdings, which include Network News & Current Affairs, Entertainment, Nature and Science. 
  • The Boston TV News Digital Library contains nearly 50,000 records of local television news coverage from the early 1960s to 2000. 
  • The Bay Area Television Archive contains 6,000 hours of newfilm, documentaries, and other television media from Northern California, dating between 1950-2000. 
  • The Museum of the Moving Image's Living Room Candidate collection contains presidential campaign commercials from 1952-present.

 

Academic Archival Resources:

  • The UCLA Film & Television Archive conserves more than 520,000 holdings of films, television programs, news footage and radio recordings. The majority of the holdings are contained in three collections:
    1. The Motion Picture Holdings includes more than 350,000 materials, with the oldest dating back to the 1890s. The holdings contain content from Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., Sony/Columbia Pictures, New World Pictures, Orion Pictures, Universal, RKO and Republic Pictures.
    2. The John H. Mitchell Television Collection documents the entire course of broadcast history: it includes the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences/UCLA Collection of Historic Television, donations from the Hallmark Hall of Fame, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Carol Burnett and Loretta Young, and a collection of milestones in the history of television technology. The News and Public Affairs (NAPA) subset consists of over 100,000 news programs and broadcasts taped off air from 1979 to 2003.
    3. The Hearst Metrotone News collection is one of the largest newsreel collections in the world, containing over 27 million feet of theatrically released newsreels, unreleased stories and outtakes that span 1914 through 1968
  • The University of Georgia's Walter J. Brown Media Archive & Peabody Awards Collection preserves over 250,000 titles in film, video, audiotape, transcription disks, and other recording formats dating from the 1920s to the present. 
  • The University of South Carolina's Moving Image Research Collections preserves films and videos produced outside the American feature film industry to make them available to present and future audiences. The Fox Movietone News Collection includes picture film documenting the national and global politics and culture from 1919 through 1934 and from September 1942 through August 1944. The Local Television Newsfilm Collections contains footage dating from the late 1950s to the early 1980s and was donated by several South Carolina television stations. Many of materials are available to view online. 
  • The University of Maryland Libraries' Digital Collections includes the Public Broadcasting collection, consisting of noncommercial radio and television programs spanning the years 1959-2004, and the Commercial Broadcasting collection, consisting of commercial radio and television programs, as well as interviews, news reports and speeches spanning the years 1952-1982.
  • The University of Virginia Center for Digital History holds the collection "Television News of the Civil Rights Era 1950-1970." The current archive contains films from the nightly news from two local television stations in Virginia--WDBJ (CBS) Roanoke and WSLS (NBC) Roanoke. 

 

Network and Broadcast News Audiovisual Resources:

  • The CBS News Video Archives spans 6 decades of flagship news programming, dating back to November 7, 1954. 
  • The CNN Collection contains archival CNN footage beginning in the early 1980s. The CNN Collection team offers research support and footage is available for licensing. 
  • The Fox Archives provides licensing for Fox Movietone Newsreels, Fox Television, Fox Sports,  Fox Nation, Fox News Channel, and Fox Business Network.
  • Getty Images hosts a large archive of photos and videos available for licensing. Their website also includes content from partners including the BBC Motion Gallery, Smithsonian, Walt Disney Studios, Premiere Archival Collection, and more. 
  • The Associate Press Archive's YouTube channel provides access to select archival footage from AP videographers/journalists.

 

Organizations:

 

If you are aware of another archival audiovisual resource, especially television news archives, not already listed here please let us know by emailing tvnews@vanderbilt.edu