FAMST 101E: Television Archives & Collections

Oral History Interviews

American Masters Digital Archive includes unreleased interviews with musicians, filmmakers, artists, historians, writers, comedians, journalists and others that were originally recorded for PBS American Masters documentaries. The collection includes 1000+ records from more than 40 episodes.

British Entertainment History Project - "For the past thirty years, The British Entertainment History Project has been recording the stories of men and women working in the UK film, television, theatre, and radio industries to ensure that information on their lives and experiences is preserved for future generations."

The Hauser Oral History Collection (The Cable Center) -- audiovisual histories from more than 360 industry members

The Interviews: An Oral History of Television (Television Academy Foundation) -- includes video recordings of oral histories from individuals involved in the birth and growth of the American television industry.

Directors Guild of America Visual History Program - Founded in 2000, the DGA’s Visual History Program has conducted more than 200 interviews with directors and director’s team members discussing their careers and creative processes in film, television and other media.

Advertisements (Political)

The Living Room Candidate (Museum of the Moving Image) -- presidential campaign commercials (1952-2020)

Television News & Public Affairs

Vanderbilt Television News Archive - The Vanderbilt Television News Archive is the world's most extensive and complete archive of television news. We have been recording, preserving and providing access to television news broadcasts of the national networks since August 5, 1968. The core collection includes evening news from ABC, CBS, and NBC (since 1968), an hour per day of CNN (since 1995) and Fox News (since 2004).

Firing Line (Television program) broadcast records (1966-1999) - includes digital copies of select records from the larger collection

Public Broadcasting

American Archive of Public Broadcasting - Search the AAPB Online Reading Room for online access to some of the digitized collection for private research, educational and informational purposes. The AAPB has also curated exhibits that feature content on topics of historical significance.

Community Access and Independent Television

Preserving Guerrilla Television (UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive) - View  raw footage that was recorded for three of Top Value Television's broadcast documentaries: Four More Years (1972) follows the well-oiled Republican convention that nominated Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, and The World's Largest TV Studio (1972) documents the Democratic convention that put George McGovern and Thomas Eagleton on the ballot. Gerald Ford's America (1975) finds these Portapak-toting "freex" embedded in the White House during the turbulent one hundred days following Nixon's resignation. As part of this project, several thousand pages of archival papers, including scrapbooks and snapshots by TVTV, have also been digitized and made available online.

Just for the Record (Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, LA) - Just for the Record, "Lesbian and Gay Television," was a monthly program produced on Cox Cable Channels 42 and 49 in New Orleans from 1987 to 1993, and was one of the city’s first LGBT+ television shows, covering both local and national topics of interest to the gay and lesbian community. 

Anthology Programs

UCLA Film & Television Archive provides access to a selection of episodes from Insight (1960-1983), a religious anthology program and a highlights from their collection of more than 80 episodes of the anthology drama U.S. Steel Hour (1953-1963)