TV News Search & Borrow

TV News Search & Borrow

The newest addition to the Internet Archive’s* vast digital collection is TV News Search and Borrow–a site that allows you to search television news coverage using keywords or phrases. You can search as far back as 2009 or as recently as 24 hours ago. You can search across 20 networks, or a single network, a particular station, or even within a single program. The result of your search is 30-second clips containing the keyword or phrase you searched for.

If you want to see more than 30-second clips, you can borrow the full broadcasts on a CD from the Archive. If you are lucky enough to live near their office (located on Clement Street in San Francisco) you can view full broadcasts on site, otherwise you can borrow them via snail mail for a $25 processing fee.

Why are the results restricted to 30-second clips? According to the Archive, the news content is copyrighted work and performance. As a library the Archive loans out the broadcasts for “personal research purposes”. But like library books, they must be returned after 30 days. And like with a book, the borrower is not “authorized” to copy or sell the borrowed work.

While you can’t re-use the 30-second clips, you can easily share them. After selecting a clip, just click “Share” and a screen will open with an URL pointing to the clip. For example, here’s a clip about the TV News Search & Borrow. You can even edit the numbers in  the URL  to get the exact 30 seconds that you want to share (see the “Help” documentation for instructions).

Closed captions are used for search and can sometimes be inaccurate. If you don’t find what you are looking for immediately, try different search terms or fudge the spelling a little. For example, you will find an additional result for Brewster Kahle (the founder of the Internet Archive) if you spell his name “Kale“.

TV News Search & Borrow is intended to be a serious tool for researchers and concerned citizens, but it also has a fun side. Results for Comedy Central‘s “The Colbert Report” and “The Daily Show” are included just like regular news programming. And, while news is the intended target, the site also inadvertently serves as an archive of commercials. If for an inexplicable reason you feel the urge to watch Geico, Purina Cat Chow, or 2012 campaign commercials, they are readily available via keyword search.

It can take a bit of time to find your way around the TV News Search & Borrow site. I made the mistake of not visiting the help page immediately. The video and documentation on the help page are quite good and I recommend starting your visit by watching the video. You can get to the help page by clicking “Help” at in the upper right-hand corner of the front page.

Search Results Page

There are a few key things to be aware of. Your initial results appear across the screen from left to right and the resulting clips will automatically start playing in order. (Use your keyboard arrow or browser scrollbar to get to more results). To  view a clip or get more information about it, click the  button in its upper right-hand corner. From the “More/Borrow” screen click to get to the Broadcast Summary.

Broadcast Summary Page

The Broadcast Summary lists every consecutive 30-second clip in a given 30-minute broadcast (note: the scrolling metaphor changes and you now scroll down, rather than across, to see all the clips). A summary of the 30-minutes is in the black box at the top. If you are patient, it’s possible to view an entire news broadcast on the Broadcast Summary page by clicking consecutive 30-second clips, but this is tedious.

Trending Graphic

TV News Search & Borrow has a number of visual features, including word clouds, which allow you to easily see prominent news topics. And a useful trending graphic in the upper right corner of the search results page shows the dates the search term appeared.

TV Search & Borrow suffers from a cluttered interface. Above the fold, the front page is clean and fairly simple. However, below the fold is a column of “Observations and Uses” which would be better placed on an “About” page.  Alongside this is a column of “Recent Comments” that adds clutter without much substance. It would be kinder to users to remove the comments to a separate page or place them in what is clearly a footer. And it would be useful to have the “Help” video on the front page where more people are likely to see and watch it.

Other interface issues include closed captions running off the bottom of the results page (I find myself constantly scrolling down to read these but there’s nothing there), the change in scrolling metaphor on the Broadcast Summary page (mentioned above), and redundant clips at the top of the Broadcast Summary. Usability could easily be improved if arrows were used to clearly mark the scrolling options. And the ability to double click a result to open the “More/Borrow” screen would be convenient.

These issues aside, TV Search & Borrow is an incredible research tool that makes what has been previously ephemeral yet civically important content available to the public.

*Disclaimer:  I used to work for the Internet Archive but I left well before this project started. I am currently volunteering for the Prelinger Archives and our workspace is housed at the Internet Archive.