Important Television Archives
Four of the most important television archives in the United States include the Library of Congress, The Paley Center for Media, The Museum of Broadcast Communications and the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Here is a little information about each of the organizations.
Library of Congress
According to the collections overview provided for television, the Library of Congress (LOC) began collecting television programs in 1949 and today holds about 80,000 programs, some of which date back to 1947. The bulk of these programs were given to the LOC for “copyright deposit.” Much of the collection exists in 16mm kinescope format with videotape acquisitions beginning in 1974. Some of the more noteworthy collections held by the LOC include: the NBC Television Collection (18,000 NBC programs from 1948 to 1977, first acquired in 1986), the NET Collection (10,000 programs from National Educational Television, the precursor to PBS, from 1955 to 1969) and the Hubert Chain Collection (early programming from 1947 in kinescope format).
Additional information on the LOC’s television holdings can be found here. Online access to the LOC’s entire catalog is available here.
The Paley Center for Media
The Paley Center for Media (PCM) was founded by famed broadcaster William S. Paley in 1975 as the Musuem of Broadcasting. In 1991 the name was changed to the Museum of Television and Radio. It took on its current name in 2007. The PCM is made up of two separate museums, one in New York City and the other in Los Angeles. Until recently, their collection of some 140,000 television programs was not available online, but today you can search from the comfort of your own home here.
The PCM website has section on “lost” programs, including this look at how television was preserved during its early years.
Museum of Broadcast Communications
Founded in 1987, the Museum of Broadcast Communications (MBC) is currently building a new facility in Chicago and thus is currently closed to the public. Their collection holds 85,000 hours of television and radio broadcasts dating back to the mid-1940s. You can search the collection here after registering a free account. You can also browse the first edition of the MBC’s Encyclopedia of Television, with some 1,000 topics, here.
UCLA Film & Television Archive
The Film & Television Archive at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is second only to the Library of Congress in terms of volume, with over 220,000 films and television programs. Their collection includes the vast majority of ABC’s prime time broadcasts between 1950 and 1979 (specifically “the early 1950s through the end of the 1970s”), plus the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences/UCLA Collection of Historic Television, and early television programs from the late 1940s and early 1950s. You can search the UCLA collection here.
There are, of course, other libraries and other archives, but these four are among the largest and most important.
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