Poring through the tapes and films stored in the archives vault at WGBH is like taking a tour of Boston history as it was captured on TV news broadcasts: Fidel Castro visits Boston in 1959; Martin Luther King Jr. marches in Roxbury in 1965; Barack Obama protests outside Harvard University in 1990.

This sealed room, kept at a constant, chilly 62 degrees, houses 750,000 recorded items from WGBH alone, from vintage film canisters to bulky videotapes from the Boston media outlet’s former “Ten O’Clock News’’ program.

Films and tapes deteriorate over time, so WGBH officials have begun ambitiously digitizing not only former newscasts from their Channel 2, but historical news footage from other local TV stations.

The result will be the Boston TV News Digital Library, the first online repository of Boston television news from 1959 to 2000. The idea is to build a video catalog of Boston history, as captured in daily newscasts, that will be available over the Internet.

FULL STORY HERE

http://www.boston.com/ae/tv/articles/2011/07/09/wgbh_builds_boston_tv_news_archive/