After being offline for several months, the Museum of Broadcast Communications archives are back online. Sort of. There is no link to searchable archives at the MBC website and the “Using the Archives” page still has the following notice:
The online archives are unavailable with the new museum under construction. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your support and interest as we move into our new home at State and Kinzie in downtown Chicago.
November 29th Update: The MBC website has taken down its notice about the archives being unavailable and a link to search the archives has returned under the Collection drop down menu.
But if you click here you will find the same old message from Bruce DuMont and you will be able to log in if you have an existing username and password (whether or not new users can register is unknown). If you have any pressing research, you might want to do it sooner rather than later. There is no way of knowing when the archives will go offline again. Thanks to Nick for letting me know the archives were back online.
I just joined as a new member. Thanks for the news.
I’m frustrated so far. I tried to find a program, a 1988 BBC/PBS documentary called “Television”, a multipart program on the history of TV. I *know* it’s there–I used to be able to find it in the archives by typing in “Television” for the title and “1988” for the year. Now, however, it seems I must know the exact broadcast dates. Which I found, yet I still can’t locate the program. Are some of the digital files not yet up and running?
I just tried searching for “television” in the Series Title field and “1988” in the Date field and found the documentary in question (although not Part 2, for some reason, maybe it was never available) complete with digital files.
Perhaps there was a hiccup in the system when you tried.
I discovered the problem–it was my browser (I use Opera, which oddly turned the “date” box into a drop-down menu). I used Internet Explorer instead, and the problem was solved. Opera does strange things to certain websites.
I can’t get any of the videos I try to play to actually play. I do have a Mac, and am wondering if that makes any difference? I really want to watch the documentary Making M*A*S*H