UW Libraries is new home for decades of KIRO-TV news video

Peter Kelley UW News

Netflix and CNN both sought decades-old KIRO-TV news footage about serial killer Ted Bundy for documentaries underway. And local public radio affiliate KUOW needed audio from old news reports for a story about Seattle houseboat owners.

But to access those old Seattle TV news clips, these producers didn’t contact KIRO — they called UW Libraries and talked with film archivist Hannah Palin.

That’s because last fall, the local station donated thousands of hours of old news videotapes of its news broadcasts from the 1970s through about the year 2000, about 15,000 videotapes in all.

With videotape technology now long past, some television stations are abandoning their archives to save space, knowing that digitizing such vast number of tapes would be cost-prohibitive.

“The most important thing to me about the collection is that it’s a visual documentation of the history of this region,” said Palin, who oversees such collections. “And it’s the same thing as having newspapers preserved. It documents the way we lived and our politics and what was important to us. And even small things like weather patterns and speech patterns.”

History recaptured:

A local woman wrote to KIRO television in January looking for footage of her own arrival as a baby to her adopted family in 1984. UW film archivist Hannah Palin was able to provide. A local woman wrote to KIRO television in January looking for footage of her own arrival as a baby to her adopted family in 1984. UW film archivist Hannah Palin was able to provide. Watch the story

Palin receives regular requests for items from the collection, from KIRO and other entities. She just found old videotapes for the Seattle municipal archives and the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, both of which are preparing exhibits on the racially motivated practice of redlining.

She said the donated tapes run from 1975 to the early 2000s, all content officially still owned by KIRO. And fortunately, she also has KIRO’s script database from those years, so when asked for a tape she can find it in the archives.

“It’s all very labor-intensive, but the good news is that KIRO was really well-organized, so it’s easy to locate things,” Palin added.

Just now, the donated tapes are mostly in storage. Palin would like to ultimately digitize the collection — but that will take much time, money and effort.

“This is magnetic media, and audio and videotape are super-fragile — they’re deteriorating. The decks (for working with such tapes) are dying, and the people who know how to work on them and are able to repair things are no longer with us. And there are no parts left! We have to keep cannibalizing, which is nerve-wracking.”

Film is not forever: Learn about local efforts to Learn about local efforts to battle the “magnetic media crisis”

The new local news archive will also be of interest to Stephen Groening, UW associate professor of comparative literature, cinema and media, who works with Palin on matters of local video. Groening said the footage will come in handy for a class in television history he teaches, as well as research projects.

Palin said she and colleagues are still trying to determine how much of the KIRO tape donation they will digitize and put online. It may be a few years before the donated tapes are all processed, she said, but they hope to have an online finding aid soon, maybe even in the next six months.

“It would be a list of what’s available,” she said. “So you would be able to look and say, ‘Oh, they do have film from 1976 when my mom was on TV!'”

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For more information, contact Palin filmarc@uw.edu.