A Public Access Workshop

Mariano, Bobby

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/1615 Copy

Description

Title

A Public Access Workshop

Author(s)

Mariano, Bobby

Issue Date

1973

Keyword(s)

• Libraries and television
• Cable television

Abstract

A public access workshop is a video-cable facility open and available for use to everyone in the community. The following is a description of the essential workings of such a facility based on the experiences of the Alternate Media Center in helping to set up workshops in DeKalb, Illinois; Orlando, Florida; and Reading, Pennsylvania, among others. In these communities, with the financial help of the local cable companies, public access channels are now in operation which are completely operated by volunteers, with only one or two paid coordinators. Through the use of these facilities anyone may reserve time on the community access cable channel on a first-come-first-served basis. The workshop's equipment includes portapaks, cameras, editing decks, monitors, microphones, lights, telephones and modulators. What is unique to these three projects, however, is the fact that these workshops each control their own public access channel, which has both live and tape capability. Their volunteers teach free classes in the use of video recorders, editing decks and cablecasting equipment. The Access Workbook, a complete documentation of how these centers operate, as well as a detailed analysis of the use of the particular equipment configurations, has recently been published by the Alternate Media Center at New York University School of the Arts. Therefore, what I will describe in this paper will be the vital psychological dimension involved in this new medium. Learning how to use portable television equipment is becoming increasingly easy. What remains difficult is learning how to communicate with these new technologies learning how to use these tools to accomplish what is most needed.

Publisher

Graduate School of Library Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Series/Report Name or Number

Allerton Park Institute (19th : 1973)

ISSN

0536-4604

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1615

Copyright and License Information

Copyright owned by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. 1972.

Owning Collections