One of the central responsibilities of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive is to ensure both the preservation of materials and their accessibility to researchers, educators, and the public. This purpose guides our current work digitizing the CNN Prime News collection. Originally recorded in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the U-Matic tapes preserved in the collection are fragile, subject to deterioration over time, and dependent on playback equipment that is increasingly rare and difficult to maintain. By digitizing this collection, we not only safeguard the content from physical degradation but also make it more widely usable and accessible for future generations.
Because the videotapes in the CNN collection are decades old, they have deteriorated over time. To prepare them for playback, we must first “bake” the tapes by placing them in a controlled heat environment that temporarily stabilizes the magnetic material. This step is critical; without it, the tapes will shed and play back poorly. Once baked, the the content on the tapes can be recorded using digitization machines. The machines are connected to capture software that records the video in real time and converts it into a digital file. After capture, some additional processing may be required to stabilize the video, such as adjusting quality for clarity.
Despite careful preparation, we frequently encounter technical difficulties. The digitization hardware we use is aging technology that is no longer being manufactured, making it increasingly difficult to repair. Machine malfunctions are common: heads get dirty or worn and individual parts can fail.
Routine cleaning of the machine heads helps alleviate some problems, but some problems are trickier to fix and require more time and resources. During playback, tapes often display jumpy horizontal lines or other visual distortions. Adjusting the skew or tracking can often improve the image, and we routinely fine-tune settings such as hue, saturation, brightness, and contrast to stabilize color output. However, if a tape is warped or damaged, there is only so much we can do to alleviate the problem. These challenges underscore the urgency of digitization: over time, both the tapes and the machines become less viable, making the content more difficult to recover.
This urgency is especially clear when we consider the uniqueness of the CNN collection. It documents decades of primetime news broadcasts, preserving a daily record of political, cultural, and social events as they unfolded. Each tape contains not just the headline stories of the day, but also the commercials, commentary, and transitions that reflect the media culture of its time. To lose this material would be to lose a valuable piece of our collective history. To date, we have digitized approximately 300 tapes out of the 1,500 undigitized CNN programs. While there is still a long way to go, every tape preserved strengthens the historical record and ensures that researchers in the future will have access to the news of the past.