By BRIAN STELTER

Published: September 13, 2009

Milton Berle, Bob Hope, Walter Cronkite and other notable alumni from television’s golden age are now telling their life stories onYouTube.

On Monday, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation will introduce EmmyTVLegends.org, a Web site that organizes its voluminous collection of interviews with TV industry legends. Its oral histories of one medium, television, are being made available to the public via another medium, the Internet.

The academy founded its preservation arm, called the Archive of American Television, more than a decade ago. Its goal was to record interviews with stars, producers, writers and executives “to create a digital encyclopedia of TV history,” said Karen Herman, the director of the archive.

Until the archive embarked on a digitization process, its stacks of videotapes languished in a temperature-controlled vault, accessible only to the researchers who visited the academy’s office.

Terri Clark, the executive director of The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation, said the archive included 630 long-form interviews to date, including four and a half hours with Mr. Cronkite, the CBS anchorman who died in July.

Some of the interviews were uploaded to YouTube previously but were difficult to navigate there. The new site allows visitors to browse by people, shows, professions and topics, and flags highlights within the videos.

The developers have added about 100 more hours of video in preparation for the new site. “It is such a treasure trove,” Ms. Herman said. Still, only half of the collection is online; Ms. Clark said more would be added.

The archive conducts about 50 interviews a year. Ms. Herman said most individuals who are approached by the archive are happy to talk about their experiences, but a few prominent names — she mentioned Mel Brooks, Bill Cosby and Jerry Seinfeld — had been hard to book.