Video Library

The C-SPAN Video Library began within the Purdue University School of Liberal Arts in 1987 under the leadership of Dr. Robert X. Browning, who sought a way to archive and index the thousands of hours of congressional coverage produced by the network every year. The project quickly became one of the most comprehensive video archives of governmental and political content, and C-SPAN assumed responsibility for the archival operations in July 1998.

In 2010, C-SPAN won its third Peabody Award for the Video Library—now a collection totaling over 215,000 hours of programming first made available to the public for free in 2007. In addition, The Video Library records all three C-SPAN networks seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Programs are extensively indexed, making the database of C-SPAN programming an unparalleled chronological resource.