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The Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries have launched a new web platform and improved database for the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, one of the most extensive and complete archives of television news in the world. The new system includes enhancements to the archive’s search capabilities, the option to browse by date, automatic delivery of loaned materials, single sign-on for Vanderbilt and sponsoring institutions, and more.
Vanderbilt has been recording, preserving and providing access to television news broadcasts of the U.S. national networks continuously since Aug. 5, 1968. The core collection includes daily evening news programs from ABC, CBS and NBC, along with CNN (since 1995), Fox News (since 2004), and MSNBC/MS NOW and NewsMax (since 2024). The archive boasts more than 98,000 broadcasts, nearly 1 million news segments, and some 60,000 hours of runtime to date. More than a quarter-million commercial breaks are also included.
“The Vanderbilt Television News Archive is a one-of-a-kind resource documenting nearly 60 years of broadcast news,” said Jon Shaw, dean of libraries and letters and Connie Vinita Dowell University Librarian. “These latest improvements make an extraordinary historical record easier for students and scholars to search, discover and use. From elections and wars to social movements and major events, the archive allows researchers to study how mainstream television has recorded and interpreted our collective history. Preserving that record and making it available for scholarship is central to the work of the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries at Vanderbilt University.”
Visitors to the online archive will notice several new filters available in the advanced search, such as “Contributors,” “Location,” “Topics” and “Transcripts.” These new facets will be available for filtering across the entire collection by fall 2027 as TVNA staff lead a data extraction project to build the tables. Contributors for content from 2025 and transcripts from ABC’s Nightline are currently available for search demonstration purposes.
These features are made possible through a series of projects underway at the TV News Archive, including:
- Transcripts – In partnership with the McGee Applied Research Center for Narrative Studies, the entire TVNA collection is being transcribed through voice-to-text automated speech recognition. Transcripts offer users the ability to search every word spoken in a news broadcast. The new advanced search interface gives users the option to search the collection by including or excluding any of three search fields: titles, descriptions, or transcripts.
- Locations and contributors – Identifying the people and places featured in news segments has long been a priority for the archive, but the data was embedded within the “Abstract Summaries” free-text field. The new database extracts these two fields and applies a linked data approach using Wikidata as a source authority. While still in development, future releases of the website will offer more opportunities to explore and interact with these two key facets.
- IPTC media topics – News segments also will be classified using the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) Media Topics subject taxonomy. This subject headings data will make broad subject research—such as national elections, natural disasters, or science and technology—easier and more versatile.
In addition to these new fields and data points, the Heard Libraries rebuilt the TVNA database to better align with current metadata practices used by peer institutions. For several years, the archive has engaged with the community supporting PBCore, a cataloging standard for audiovisual content led by the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. The new TVNA database is fully PBCore compliant, allowing for future interoperability and exchanges of information through collaborative projects.
“With over 1 million news segments, the TVNA database has grown to represent a monumental dataset,” said director Jim Duran. “Our improvements to the data’s structure and standards will not only serve traditional research but open up the collection for new forms of research in data science and computational methods.”
The TVNA is a vital tool of the McGee Applied Research Center for Narrative Studies, established in 2022 to promote media literacy by providing resources to analyze and evaluate news coverage, digital media and other narratives. The interdisciplinary center supports faculty research, classroom instruction and student immersion experiences.
“Since its founding, the TVNA has been an important resource for investigating the intersection of media and society,” said Kristy Roschke, the McGee Center’s executive director and a renowned expert in media literacy and misinformation. “It has been cited in hundreds of academic articles on topics ranging from presidential campaigns and global conflicts to public health and natural disasters. The TVNA’s new features accelerate television media research and expand research possibilities by enabling computational analysis of full-text transcripts, in addition to content analysis of video broadcasts.”
Borrowing Policies for Students and Faculty
The updated platform will enforce new lending limits on archival news media in a way that aligns with modern library systems. Users may borrow a maximum of 40 hours (2,400 minutes) of content per month. Borrowing quotas reset at the start of each month.
This limit does not apply to public researchers unaffiliated with a college or university that sponsors the TVNA; however, public users must complete a payment process for individual items borrowed. Learn more about pricing for loan requests.
For more information or to read updates on the TVNA blog, visit tvnews.vanderbilt.edu.