Open Vault provides easy access to short excerpts from historic videos produced between 1950 and 1993. The videos were excerpted from four programmes: Say Brother (388 segments), the Ten O'clock News (543 segments), the New Television Workshop (368 segments), and a series entitled War and Peace in the Nuclear Age (51 segments). The programmes were produced by the public television station WGBH. They hope to start adding a major collection during 2008. Transcripts of the programmes are sometimes available. Video excerpts average one to three minutes and easily load (after QuickTime is downloaded). Keyword searching is possible. Users can browse by broad categories or subcategories. Users can also browse by people or series.
This is a delicious concoction of images of America's recent past. There are live action clips of demonstrations and traditional news‐format interview clips. The complete originals are at the WGBH Media Library and Archives and are available there for on‐site research under normal archival parameters. Residents of Massachusetts are likely to be most interested in this resource, since most of the videos centre on Massachusetts. Anyone looking for a local perspective on national and international events, however, will enjoy this site.
Clips from the Ten O'clock News will be useful to historians and journalism students as the viewer can study trends in television news. Some familiar names encountered here include Steve Biko, Julian Bond, Jesse Jackson, and Henry Kissinger. The excerpts include shorts from apartheid protests, conversations with teens about race relations, and interviews with a variety of people from all walks of life about home‐ownership, school desegregation, public housing and an array of other topics. The excerpts from Say Brother, a news programme by, for, and about African Americans, cover a world of topics. There is Odetta performing with her guitar, Maya Angelou reading a poem, as well as topical segments on the African American experience, such as Portrait of a Working Poor Family. There are also pieces on immigration, the Japanese Internment experience, and a myriad of other topics.
Arts aficionados will appreciate the shorts taken from the New Television Workshop, which originated at WGBH in 1974 to support the creation and development of experimental video art. Included here are excerpts from poets such as Robert Bly and Lucille Clifton reading their works, shorts from many choreographers, and a variety of artistic videos like the one “The Meaning of the Interval”, which is a collage of images of a Japanese geisha, a tattoo in the making, and a chanting monk. The War and Peace segments include high‐ranking politicians discussing their views on the SALT (strategic arms limitation) talks, the Cuban missile crisis, and issues around the nuclear arms race.
These snippets contain so many insights into America's recent history, not only the text but the subtext of that history. Dipping into these videos is seeing both what was talked about and how it was talked about. This is a great resource.
