[Infowarrior] - C-Span Puts Full Archives on the Web

[Richard Forno]

March 16, 2010
C-Span Puts Full Archives on the Web
By BRIAN STELTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/arts/television/16cspan.html?pagewanted=print
WASHINGTON — Researchers, political satirists and partisan  
mudslingers, take note: C-Span has uploaded virtually every minute of  
its video archives to the Internet.

The archives, at C-SpanVideo.org, cover 23 years of history and five  
presidential administrations and are sure to provide new fodder for  
pundits and politicians alike. The network will formally announce the  
completion of the C-Span Video Library on Wednesday.

Having free online access to the more than 160,000 hours of C-Span  
footage is “like being able to Google political history using the ‘I  
Feel Lucky’ button every time,” said Rachel Maddow, the liberal MSNBC  
host.

Ed Morrissey, a senior correspondent for the conservative blog Hot Air  
(hotair.com), said, “The geek in me wants to find an excuse to start  
digging.”

No other cable network is likely to give away its precious archives on  
the Internet. (Even “Book TV” is available.) But C-Span is one of a  
kind, a creation of the cable industry that records every  
Congressional session, every White House press briefing and other acts  
of official Washington.

The online archives reinforce what some would call the Web’s single  
best quality: its ability to recall seemingly every statement and  
smear. And it is even more powerful when the viewer can rewind the  
video.

The C-Span founder, Brian Lamb, said in an interview here last week  
that the archives were an extension of the network’s public service  
commitment.

“That’s where the history will be,” Mr. Lamb said.

C-Span has been uploading its history for several years, working its  
way to 1987, when its archives were established at Purdue University,  
Mr. Lamb’s alma mater.

The archive staff now operates from an office park in West Lafayette,  
Ind., where two machines that can turn 16 hours of tapes into digital  
files each hour have been working around the clock to move C-Span’s  
programs online. They are now finishing the 1987 catalog.

“This is the archive’s coming of age, in a way, because it’s now so  
accessible,” said Robert Browning, director of the archives.

Historically, the $1 million-a-year operation has paid for itself  
partly by selling videotapes and DVDs to journalists, campaign  
strategists and others.

Mr. Browning acknowledges that video sales have waned as more people  
have viewed clips online. “On the other hand, there are a lot of  
things people now watch that they never would have bought,” he said.

The archives’ fans include Ms. Maddow, who called it gold. “It’s raw  
footage of political actors in their native habitat, without media  
personalities mediating viewers’ access,” she wrote in an e-mail  
message.

Similarly, Mr. Morrissey said the archives made “for a really  
intriguing reference set.” He pointed out, however, that the volume of  
videos “is so vast that finding valuable references may be a bit like  
looking for a needle in a haystack.”

C-Span executives said they hoped that its search filters would be up  
to the task. Mr. Lamb said, “You can see if politicians are saying one  
thing today, and 15 years ago were saying another thing.”

He added, “Journalists can feast on it.”

One of the Web site’s features, the Congressional Chronicle, shows  
which members of Congress have spoken on the House and Senate floors  
the most, and the least. Each senator and representative has a profile  
page. Using the data already available, some newspapers have written  
about particularly loquacious local lawmakers.

C-Span was established in 1979, but there are few recordings of its  
earliest years. Those “sort of went down the drain,” Mr. Browning  
said. But he does have about 10,000 hours of tapes from before 1987,  
and he will begin reformatting them for the Web soon. Those tapes  
include Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign speeches and the Iran- 
Contra hearings.

In a tour of the site last week, Mr. Browning said the various uses of  
the archives were hard to predict. He found that a newly uploaded 1990  
United Nations address by the Romanian president Ion Iliescu was  
quickly discovered and published by several Romanian bloggers.

While C-Span does not receive Nielsen ratings, a recent poll by  
Fairleigh Dickinson University found that 52 percent of voters said  
they watched it at least once in a while. The poll did not distinguish  
among C-Span’s three channels. The original one, C-Span, shows every  
House of Representatives session; C-Span2 does the same for the  
Senate; and C-Span3 shows committee hearings, briefings, conferences  
and other events.

The archives of all three channels have been mostly uploaded, but they  
can only be streamed. Mr. Browning said video downloads were on his  
agenda. Users can embed the videos on other Web sites and clip small  
sound bites for repeat viewing.

The clips can help citizens gain access to important information, of  
course, but they can also be entertaining.

Last month one of the top clips on the C-Span site was from President  
Obama’s health care summit meeting, but it wasn’t of a comment about  
proposed legislation, it was of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.  
caught on a microphone saying, “It’s easy being vice president.” A  
spokesman for the vice president told reporters that Mr. Biden was  
“obviously joking.”

Regardless, the archives are a reminder that the cameras are always  
recording. For politicians or anyone else captured by C-Span, Mr.  
Browning said, “there’s no more deniability.”