A team of students led by Elon University professor Connie Book will travel next week to Wilmington, N.C., to document what happens when the first American media market transitions from traditional analog to all-digital television broadcast.

The Elon team will have exclusive access to real-time reaction after the conversion is made on Sept. 8. Students will be on site at broadcast towers with digital video recorders to capture images of the moment when engineers shut down the analog signal transmitters.

They will also assist local television stations with answering phones once the conversion takes effect at noon. They will survey local residents who call to complain, collecting from them demographic information, their prior knowledge about the conversion, and reasons for not buying a digital converter box.

Book, who has extensively researched the television industry, hopes to share data with the FCC and television networks in the lead-up to the national digital transition that takes place in February 2009.

Author of the 2004 book Digital Television: DTV and the Consumer, Book is associate dean of the School of Communications at Elon. She has previously consulted with the National Association of Broadcasters, Panasonic and Capitol Broadcasting (Raleigh, N.C.), among others. In 2004, Book presented research findings to the FCC on gains made among women in the communications industry.

Book has received four grants from the National Association of Broadcasters to study consumers' digital TV habits. She has studied the transition to digital television for years and worked with Capitol Broadcasting as it pioneered the development of high definition technology.

She was part of the team that tested the first HDTV sets ever produced, and studied the reactions of the first 10 families in the nation who experienced high-definition television in their homes.