TV News Archives

* “Nation’s Only TV News Archive May Fade Out” (American Album, Sept. 20) draws attention to the Vanderbilt Archive’s quarter-century of distinguished and innovative service. The American public owes a tremendous debt to the archive, and it would indeed be a national tragedy if budgetary shortfalls forced Vanderbilt to close.

However, I would like to call your readers’ attention to the existence of other television news archives in the United States. The UCLA Film and Television Archive holds more than 90,000 hours of news programming, with a strength in both local and national coverage. Additionally, the Wolfson Center in Miami; Texas Tech University in Lubbock (a repository for international programming obtained by CNN); Purdue University in Lafayette, Ind. (the repository for C-SPAN), and locally oriented TV news collections at a variety of institutions are among the other examples. Each has its unique mission and place, but all serve the public and scholarly community by safeguarding the primary information media of the Information Age.

ROBERT ROSEN

Director, UCLA Film

and Television Archive