By Sam Harnett, KQED News Fix
When San Francisco Bay Area Television archivist Alex Cherian got a telephone call from ex-film editor Dave Peoples, he got excited. Peoples, who had worked at local station KRON-4, was offering outtakes, long stretches of B-roll that provided an intimate and unedited glimpse of historical events in the area.
Peoples didn’t know, however, if it would still be good after sitting in his storage facility by the freeway in Berkeley for over 40 years. Film, after all, degrades with time. It’s also bulky and expensive to store, let alone archive in some kind of organized, searchable way.
Over the years, entertainment and news organizations have lacked the resources and will to preserve all the material they produced. While today Bay Area organizations like the Pacific Film Archive and national institutions like the Library of Congress are starting to preserve old movies in earnest, local TV programming is a different story. A patchwork of independent organizations are archiving old television material, but the effort is far from comprehensive.
Read the complete story at KQED News Fix.