Who knows television? Online access and the gatekeepers of knowledge

This article investigates the implications of online access to television archival material and the knowledge it represents. I discuss the impact of digitisation on the TV archive, and ask how that affects the role of the archivist as a gatekeeper to its knowledge. I argue that far from being a gatekeeper, the archivist becomes an editor of data generated by various agents. The article also questions the impact of this development on the status of television archives as repositories of television history - what happens to the 'history' in television history when its digitised source material becomes part of an eternal online present?