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All the TV News Since 2009, on One Web Site

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Mon, 2012-10-22 19:46 — haroon

The Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization with the stated mission of preserving the public works of human kind and to make them widely accessible, has come up with a new service called TV News Search & Borrow. Inspired by the Vanderbilt Television News Archive (archive of television news broadcasts since 1968), the Internet Archive is collecting and maintaining a database of news programs from 20 news stations in the United States. The collection now has over 370,000 news programs collected from the year 2009. It has almost all the news programs broadcasted on the 20 channels in the past 3 years and new programs are being added to the database continuously.

This service has been designed with the upcoming U.S president elections in mind. The main objective of this initiative from Internet Archive is to make information easily accessible to citizens. It aims at creating awareness among people and to help them analyze and better understand the issues around them and to know about their candidates. However the contents are not restricted to politics or president elections. One can search news programs related to any kind of topics like sports, science and so on.



The site uses transcripts produced by closed captioning to allow users search through the archives online. Search queries are matched against the closed captions in the transcripts. A 30 second clip of the program that matches with each search result is made available to people who can view them for free. One can also borrow the whole program from the Internet Archive library. The site also displays a tag cloud of popular topics based on their frequency of occurrence in the broadcasts. Another feature the site offers is the option to narrow down the search to a particular network or TV show and also mention a specific time frame.



The site is being updated continuously with the news programs. New programs are recorded every day from the 20 news network locations and are added to the collection 24 hours after they have been broadcasted in the channels. Old collections are also aggregated and added to the database.

This tool will be very helpful for both researchers and common people. One can get the source of news on a particular topic, which media channel covered it extensively and how the news story progressed and so on.


Related Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/business/media/internet-archive-amasses-all-tv-news-since-2009.html?ref=business&_r=0

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