Reels and tapes of classic Mississippi Public Broadcasting programs and shows, such as “The Magic Place,” “The Measuring Show,” and “Funnybones,” will soon be converted into a digital format as part of a legislatively-approved preservation project.
This week, MPB will ship more than 1,500 obsolete format items to George Blood LP, a Pennsylvania-based image preservation company. Obsolete formats include videotapes and individual film reels.
Television and video recordings hold significant historical, political, and cultural relevance. MPB’s collection spans over five decades and encompasses original productions that were broadcast internationally. MPB employees have spent the past several months organizing, cataloguing, and quantifying the resources.
Also among this week’s first shipment are several hundred reels of footage of authors William Faulkner and Richard Wright, the Neshoba County Fair, and previous gubernatorial inaugurations.
MPB Chief of Staff Marvin Jeter said preservation efforts began about decade ago when the American Archives for Public Broadcasting, using grant funding in 2013, digitized a small MPB collection of approximately 340.
“A couple of years ago, MPB requested an allocation from our Legislature to digitize and preserve more of our culturally and historically significant work,” Jeter said. “We received that allocation in 2022, and we’ve been reviewing and organizing our collections and selecting the items for digitization since that time.”
In fall 2023, the AAPB announced a funding opportunity from the Mellon Foundation to digitize a significant number of additional American broadcasting work. AAPB released a request for proposals, seeking up to 2,000 pieces each from stations across the country.
AAPB, in partnership with the Library of Congress, realized the national value of MPB’s collections when the state agency answered the request for proposals.
“They responded by asking MPB to send twice as many for them to digitize and store for full access of teachers, scholars, and researchers from around the world,” Jeter said. “When they realized that we were in the process of digitizing more materials with our legislative allocation, they asked that we send it to them once digitized so that they could add it to their public television collections.”
As part of the current phase of the project, MPB will digitize over 5,000 pieces of media – 4,000 funded by AAPB and slightly over 1,000 funded by the legislative allocation. Afterward, MPB will catalogue another 25,000 or more items, including B-roll, outtakes, and extended interviews. All will be digitized, and some of the material hosted by the Library of Congress.
“MPB is honored that such prestigious and knowledgeable leaders in media recognize the work that has been done in Mississippi and appreciate the significance to the degree that they are willing to accept our work,” said MPB Executive Director Royal Aills.
MPB Archivist Jaz Kolkovich said it is imperative that MPB swiftly preserves as much as possible.
“Older film is essentially plastic with chemicals and gets extremely brittle. There is at least 25 percent of the media severely compromised and will never be able to be digitized,” Kolkovich said.
Fortunately, many old MPB favorites can be preserved, including “The Measuring Show,” which starred Mary Ann Mobley in the late 1970s, and the children’s shows, “The Magic Place” and “Funnybones.”