This article was underwritten in part by the Mickey Flacks Journalism Fund for Social Justice, a proud, innovative supporter of local news. To make a contribution go to sbcan.org/journalism_fund.
Folks can now access more than 1,600 hours of news footage dating back decades. This year, the UC Santa Barbara Library launched a streaming service containing thousands of hours of digitized media content from KEYT television station.
On Tuesday, folks gathered at the library’s Special Research Collections to celebrate the milestone. The event, “From Airwaves to Archives,” included a panel with veteran reporters and anchors Tracy Lehr and John Palminteri, and former journalist and KEYT news director Paul Vercammen. News Channel 3-12’s general manager Jim Lemon moderated the panel, and Herb Tuyay, KEYT’s longtime videographer and a driving force behind the donation, answered questions from near the front.
Since 2016, UC Santa Barbara Library’s Special Research Collections staff has been working to digitize more than 30,000 hours of video recording and millions of feet of 16mm film donated by KEYT. More than 1,600 hours of that archive — documenting life and news in Santa Barbara over four decades — is now available for the public to see online.
Laura Treat Liebhaber, UCSB curator and film and media studies librarian, said that in her experience as a historian, working with TV archives is pretty rare.
“[Events] come to life in a way they just simply can’t in a photo or document,” she said.
But Treat Liebhaber said that across the nation, 80 percent of local television recorded before 1995 is lost, and what’s left could be gone by 2040 without an effort to preserve it.
Jim Lemon, News 3-12’s general manager, celebrated Treat Liebhaber and her team’s work. He said digitizing the video archive was a painstakingly slow process — everything has to play in real time.
“What these folks here at UCSB have done is put it in a place [where] you can put it on your laptop and play it,” he said.
During the panel, Lehr, Palminteri, and Vercammen talked about the impact of local journalism and what it was like covering emotional and sometimes dangerous events. Lehr spoke about covering the Isla Vista shooting in 2014, while Palminteri talked about reporting on wildfires and the courage of the camera people, often young, who come with them. Vercammen said that uplifting stories from the community helped counterbalance the weight of hard news.
“For every disaster, there [are] great stories after in forms of recovery,” said videographer Tuyay from the front of the room at one point in the evening.
You can access the digitized footage here. Archive staff are continuing to work to digitize content and add to it — some of it is already queued up to go online.
