The C-SPAN Video Archive: A Magnificent Achievement for the Nation

By Ray Smock
 
I am just back from a visit to the C-SPAN Video Library, at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN. This incredible vast video archive contains more than 231,000 hours of C-SPAN broadcasts going back more than thirty years, and it is growing daily, with digital audio and video recordings of each day’s broadcasts on the three C-SPAN channels and C-SPAN radio.  While I have been a user of this archive before, this was my first opportunity to see how it works. 

C-SPAN President and CEO Susan Swain, Dr. Robert X. Browning, and Ray Smock at the C-SPAN Video Archive in West Lafayette, IN.

​In 1979, the U.S. House of Representatives began recording floor proceedings in the House, but in those days the tapes were not considered of historical value and were recycled every 60 days.  I helped change that practice when I served as House Historian and helped convince House leaders that these videos had great historical value.  Now the recordings are preserved at the National Archives and at the Library of Congress. The Senate began broadcasting its floor proceedings in 1986, first as an experiment, then as a regular procedure in 1987, with the backing of Senators Robert C. Byrd and Howard Baker, and the constant efforts of C-SPAN’s first president and CEO, Brian Lamb.
 
It was C-SPAN that had the vision and the wherewithal to find a way (and the funds from the Cable TV industry) to convert thousands of hours of analog tape to digital and then devise a system of easy access, by indexing, and key-word searching, that brings this vast resource to everyone with Internet access on their home computers.
 
Dr. Robert X. Browning was the driving force in the creation and development of the C-SPAN Archive. Proudly displayed in the C-SPAN offices in West Lafayette is the prestigious Peabody Award that the C-SPAN Video Archive received in 2010 for “creating an enduring archive of the history of American policymaking, and for providing it as a free, user-friendly public service…”

Dr. Robert X. Browning, Director of the C-SPAN Video Archive, explains equipment used to access 230,000 hours of C-SPAN broadcasts over more than 30 years.

​Television has changed the way we perceive politics, with mostly positive results but also with some unanticipated negatives too. A video clip can reveal truth and provide insight, but a string of video clips, out of context, and manipulated for partisan purposes or for propaganda, can deceive the untrained eye. We all tend to believe what we see on television because we normally believe what our eyes can see.  

One of the many rows of archived video tape at the C-SPAN Archive.

Research using video broadcasts offers incredible opportunities to researchers and teachers in many fields including history, political science, mass communications, American culture, the art of governance, human psychology, biography, and journalism, to name a few.
 
The fact that this vast archive is available free to the public and is so readily accessible and easy to use is a remarkable feat and it is a model for how we can and should preserve audio and visual material for future use. Digital resources are incredibly important but they can be ephemeral, and easy to lose because we do not systematically save such records. The digital age is fraught with perils because we do not systematically archive enough of records that are born in digital format, nor do we have the funds to systematically identify and preserve in digital format the paper records of the past that can be made more accessible if they were in digital form. ​

A back-up emergency broadcast studio is part of the C-SPAN Video Archive.

​C-SPAN has done its part magnificently. When will other producers of video create their own archives, and make it available for research? We have lived in the Age of Television for more than 70 years. It shapes our lives and our politics like no other medium, including the newer social media.  We need to look more critically at how this medium (and newer social media) shape our lives and our perceptions of reality. We have only scratched the surface of understanding how TV affects us. We all carry around with us in our pockets and purses, “phones” that record and play TV. Each of us has become a miniature recording studio of our own lives and sometimes of breaking news. What is this doing to how we see virtually everything?