TV legends' histories just a mouse click away

Karen Herman wants Bill Cosby to have his rightful place in history.

TV history, that is.

Herman, a former journalist who is the director of the Archive of American Television in North Hollywood, has wanted to add Cosby's tale to the archive's collection of videotaped oral histories for years, but so far no luck. Scheduling problems, it seems.

"He's so critical to TV history," she says. "Mel Brooks is another one." And another one on Herman's wish list.

"Capturing television history one voice at a time" is the motto of the archive, which contains interviews with nearly 600 key industry figures. What sets the archive apart, though, is that hundreds of hours of those interviews can also be seen on YouTube, to the delight of TV buffs everywhere.

Want to get Jack Larson's take on what it was like to play Jimmy Olsen in the "Superman" TV series of the 1950s? It's there. As are Ron Howard's recollections of working on "The Andy Griffith Show," William Shatner's remembrances of "Star Trek" and James Arness' reflections on "Gunsmoke."

A glance at the archive's YouTube channel ( www.youtube.com/user/tv legends) shows that more than 1,900 videos are available online -- that's about 950 hours of viewing. (A full list of interviewees can be found at emmytvlegends .org.)

"Before, people had to visit our offices to watch the stuff, and now people all over the world" can, Herman notes. Archive videos first went online at Google Video in 2005 but began moving to YouTube in 2007 after Google's 2006 purchase of the popular video-sharing site -- a transition that is ongoing.

A project of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation -- the charitable arm of the organization behind the Emmy Awards -- the archive was inspired by the videotaped testimonies of Holocaust survivors conducted by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation founded by Steven Spielberg.

Former Disney Television and UPN President "Dean Valentine brought the idea to the television academy in '96, and they sponsored a test project of six interviews," Herman says. "Then the academy adopted it in '97 as a full project." The first interviewees included Elma Farnsworth, widow of TV inventor Philo Farnsworth; Milton Berle; ABC founder Leonard Goldenson; and producer Sheldon Leonard.