Weeks after unveiling a new website that allows easier and customizable access to the large and growing body of materials in the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection, the library has announced a collaboration with LTV that will both preserve and make freely available noteworthy content in LTV’s archive of more than 22,000 programs, depicting more than a century of East Hampton’s history.
The project involves the transfer of the archive from DVD, once considered a state-of-the-art storage format but now understood to have a limited shelf life, to MPEG-4 files, which are generally compatible with computer applications like QuickTime, Windows Media Player, iTunes, and VLC Media Player.
The library, Dennis Fabiszak, its executive director, said, will provide cataloging and fund-raising for the project. After the material has been transferred and cataloged, it will be stored at the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a collaboration of the Library of Congress and WGBH, Boston’s PBS station, from which it can be searched and streamed.
“The more historic films in the collection will also be hosted and made part of the digital Long Island Collection website we launched a few weeks ago,” he said. That website is at digitallongisland.org.
The partnership and the archive’s migration to the Long Island Collection make sense, Genie Chipps Henderson, LTV’s longtime archivist, said this week. LTV “is a production house for the public,” she said, and is not in the business of preservation. “As much as LTV will continue to utilize the treasures from the archive, preservation is what the library has valiantly stepped forward to do.”
Ms. Henderson, who is also a videographer and the author of “A Day Like Any Other,” a novel about the hurricane that ravaged the town in 1938, will be the project’s historian, Mr. Fabiszak said.
After a yearslong process of transferring content from tape formats to DVD, and the subsequent understanding that the latter is not an appropriate archival format, LTV contacted the Regional Media Legacies project, part of New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program, which is supported by the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation. “They came out and were bowled over,” Ms. Henderson said. “They had no idea that something like this existed. They gave us a heads-up as to how valuable it was.”
The archive is abundant with content illustrating the town’s unique place in the world, a fishing and farming community turned summer playground of the rich and famous, a rural community that has long attracted artists, writers, and other creative people along with, more recently, captains of industry, media titans, and those famous for being famous. Edward Albee, Elaine de Kooning, and Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley are among the luminaries captured on film.
But so are “A Sense of Place” and “Artists Speak,” to name two popular and long-running local programs; the illustrator and summer resident Hamilton King’s film shot between 1927 and 1935; decades-old footage of haulseiners at work; the 1970 launch, in Springs, of the Free Life hot-air balloon, and the Ladies Village Improvement Society’s annual fair in the summer of 1927. One stunning piece of film captures a Fourth of July parade in 1915, transferred from highly flammable cellulose nitrate film.
Also chronicled are the restorations of the village’s Thomas Moran House and Old Hook Mill. “This is the inner workings, the various preservationists telling exactly what they’re doing,” Ms. Henderson said. “That has to be extremely valuable as these things disappear or become older and older.”
“Over the years,” she said, “we have built up the archive beyond when LTV came into existence,” officially in 1984. “But the real value in that archive is not so much 100-year-old film, which of course is great fun to watch, but it’s the storytelling of all these people over the past 40 years who have told the story of East Hampton and their families.”
That, she said, is why LTV’s entire collection of programming was saved. “At one point, we were going to pick the most valuable, but it’s impossible. You think you can throw out some show on crystals, or the junior varsity basketball game, and all of a sudden it’s part of who we are, what we are. It’s what public access is really all about. These are the people who took the time and trouble to make a show and bring it to LTV.”
“As I’ve sat there with that archive for the last 15 years,” she said, “those are the things that keep surfacing as the most valuable, these stories about this storied place, if you will. There’s nothing more interesting than this old town, one of the oldest in America.”
Some of the archive is available at LTV’s website, ltveh.org, and on its YouTube channel. “But really, not even 5 percent of what’s in the collection is accessible online,” Mr. Fabiszak said. “This will bring all of it into one place, where it will be preserved but also made accessible.”
Information, and a means to donate to the project, are at easthamptonlibrary.org/reelvideo. Approximately half of a $100,000 budget for the project’s first year has been raised, he said. “That won’t complete the project, but it will get us into a good portion of it and let us forecast what we need to complete it going forward from that year.”
“We’re hoping that the campaign we’re doing, besides raising funds for this project, will encourage people to look through their attics and dig up other old film,” Mr. Fabiszak said.
