Individuals may request loans of broadcasts or selected items from the archive's collection for reference, study, classroom instruction, and research.

The mission of the archive is to equip students and scholars with the tools necessary to both engage with and critique news coverage by making actual copies widely available.

According to the official history of the archive written by Simpson, he watched a news program where Timothy Leary recommended that young Americans find themselves by freeing their mind and experimenting with LSD.

just a bunch of old radio hands learning the hard way that cameras need something more than emulsion and light valves to create electronic journalism.

Initially, he sought out funding to begin a nonprofit organization;[7] however, he ultimately decided that a college library would be more ideal because of its expertise in preserving newspapers and magazines.

The Television News Archive of Vanderbilt University has worked cooperatively with the Library to help fulfill ATRA’s mandate.” [10] This relationship continues to the present.

In January 1994, the Archive was given a special award by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Nashville/MidSouth Chapter on the occasion of its 25th anniversary.

Other than those occurrences, most of the weekend pre-emptions were (and still are) due to coverage of sporting events such as college and professional football and golf, protected contractually from being interrupted before their endings (see "Heidi Game" for explanation).

In a number of cases, because of the convergence of preemptions on all three (historic) local network affiliates, some dates on weekends, again mainly in the 1960s and 1970s, have no newscasts at all available in the Archive.

Some of the oldest tapes in the collection, mainly between 1968 and 1973, suffered varying degrees of loss of picture quality due to natural deterioration before they were digitized in the 2000s.

With a few exceptions, the archive does not include recordings of documentaries and magazine shows such as 60 Minutes, 20/20, and Dateline NBC, because they typically are not concerned with immediate issues and events, and because of network policies where transcripts and video of those programs are already sold by the network news organizations for a fee by an outside provider (along with 20/20 and Dateline's drifts towards a format of precompiled true crime stories).