The Changing Role of Television in the Museum

Abstract

Museums are a useful source for access to audiovisual heritage—a heritage that is largely unavailable due to restrictions by corporate archives that tend to insulate their assets from the general public and academics. Yet television or broadcasting museums provide access not only to programs from television’s past but also to historical and contemporary artifacts. The potential for such museums to be places of discourse, education, and the shaping of memory is underlined by the connections between television as a mass medium and everyday life, culture, and history. At the same time, television museums have to struggle with the same problems as audiovisual archives: the obsolescence of tape formats, cost-intensive equipment, and the inevitability of digitization. Although there are overlaps with the tasks of archives and libraries, museums selectively collect and curate for the general public. The primary reason for the formation of television museums—the extensive loss of programming in the broadcasting archives—has met with the additional mission for media literacy education to enhance understanding of the medium’s mechanisms—in retrospect and advance.In June 2006, the first television museum in Germany opened its doors on the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin as a division of the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, a foundation for film and television. This development took twenty long years of wrangling over the character and mission of the institution. The museum’s operations are guaranteed until the end of 2012 by a broad coalition of financiers from the public broadcasters ARD, ZDF, Veolia Water, a division of the media conglomerate Vivendi, State Media Broadcasting Authorities, and finally the German government (which pays the rent).