1.
WELCOME PART 1 OF 2 WEBINARS March 2, 2018
Jessica Hardin
Program Coordinator, BLC
jhardin@blc.org
Casey Davis Kaufman
Associate Director,WGBH Media Library
and Archives
Project Manager, AAPB
casey_davis-kaufman@wgbh.org
Ryn Marchese
Engagement and Use Manager, AAPB
ryn_marchese@wgbh.org
“Accessibility of AAPB in Academic Libraries”

2.
a collaboration between the
Library of Congress and WGBH
Seeking to preserve and make
accessible significant historical
content created by public
media, and to coordinate a
national effort to save at-risk
public media before its content
is lost to posterity.
Mission:

3.
Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation

4.
WGBH Educational Foundation
American Archive of Public Broadcasting

5.
Goals
Coordinate a national effort to preserve and make
accessible as much significant public broadcasting
materials as possible
Become a focal point for discoverability
Provide standards and best practices for storing,
processing, preserving, and making accessible historical
content
Facilitate the use of archival content by scholars,
educators, students, journalists, media producers,
researchers, and the public
Increase public awareness of the significance of historical
public media and the need to preserve it and make it
accessible

6.
Background
Identified more than 3 million items kept at stations,
archives, producers, university collections across the
country dating back to the 1950s
2.5 million inventory records from 120 stations
CPB Digitization Project - 40,000 hours of digital
material initially from more than 100 stations
Selection of the “Permanent Home”

7.
More than 50,000 hours of digitized and born
digital material from over 100 public
broadcasting stations and organizations
Website launched October 2015
>31,000 streaming video and audio files in an
Online Reading Room (36% of full collection)
Public access to the full collection of video and
audio on-site at WGBH and the Library of
Congress
>2.5 million inventory records from 120 stations
The AAPB Collection
www.americanarchive.org

8.
Imperative Need
The audiovisual records of the 20th century are increasingly
at risk.
The 2012 National Recording Preservation Plan stated that
“many endangered analog formats must be digitized within
the next 15 or 20 years before further degradation makes
preservation efforts all but impossible.”
As this report was years in the making, we may now have
no more than 10 to 15 years to preserve this material.
Moreover, “audiovisual materials are the fastest-growing
segment of our nation’s archives and special collections,” as
reported by the Library of Congress.

9.
20+ years
ago…
Public television has been responsible for the
production, broadcast, and dissemination of
some of the most important programs which
in aggregate form the richest audiovisual
source of cultural history in the United States.
. . . [I]t is still not easy to overstate the
immense cultural value of this unique
audiovisual legacy, whose loss would
symbolize one of the great conflagrations of
our age, tantamount to the burning of
Alexandria’s library in the age of antiquity.
-Television and Video Preservation (1997), a
Library of Congress report

10.
Cultural heritage
at stake
“I’ve long been
frustrated…gaining access to
the vast audiovisual record of
my period.”
”Working to document recent
American history without
access to the pictures has
been a real challenge.”
“Key historical moments and
events are lost to us forever.”

11.
AAPB Collaboration
Shared Responsibilities
– Overall governance
– Policy
– Collection development
– Ingest
– Rights decisions
Preservation Access &
Outreach

12.
A Centralized
Web Portal
for Discovery
All AAPB digitized content discoverable through single
searches
Direct links to public media on other sites (KUHT,
Louisiana Public Broadcasting, Minnesota Public Radio,
WNYC)
One-stop shopping
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) as a model
Helps solve the separate silos syndrome for search and
discovery

13.
Access via the AAPB
Other Access Points
FIX IT, FIX IT+, and ROLL THE
CREDITS
All metadata available via an API
Transcripts for materials in the
Online Reading Room available via
an API
ORR harvested and accessible via
the Digital Public Library of America
Social media accounts often
highlight collections, stations, or
themes of interest
On Location Access
Available to researchers who
visit WGBH and the Library of
Congress
Online Reading Room Access
Available within the U.S. for research,
educational and informational purposes
(download not authorized)
Behind firewall subject to terms of use
In a category approved by counsel as
fair use
Streaming only
Subject to notice and takedown policy
Certain materials not available online
are accessible via password-protected
two-week access for bona fide
research purposes

14.
Online
Reading
Room
(ORR)
ORR totals more than 31,000 programs available
to anyone in the United States
Online access in accordance with the copyright
law of the United States, including the legal
doctrine of fair use
Access for research, educational, and
informational purposes only
Inclusion in the ORR determined by analysis of
types of programs and examination of individual
series and programs

15.
Metadata
• Titles
• Contributing
Organization
• Identifiers
• Description
• Date
• Asset Type
• Genres
• Creators
• Contributors
• Publishers
• Media Type
• Copyright
• Duration

16.
Curated Exhibits
Curators contextualize digitized primary
and secondary source public television
and radio materials. Each curated set of
selected recordings present a diversity of
perspectives concerning the exhibit's
focus.
http://americanarchive.org/exhibits

17.
“Gavel-to-
Gavel”: The
Watergate
Scandal
and Public
Television
http://americanarchive.org/ex
hibits/watergate
1972-1974

18.
Special Collections
Each Special Collection
provides detailed information
about the content, such as its
creator, recommended search
strategies, and related
resources.
http://americanarchive.org/sp
ecial_collections

19.
Special Collections

20.
Incoming Collections
PBS NewsHour
Digitization Project
Peabody Awards
Digitization
Project
National Educational
Television Collection
Catalog Project
Riverside Radio
WRVR
Digitization
Project

21.
Other new
collections
• CUNY-TV: Magazines and public affairs programs
produced by CUNY-TV
• KBOO-FM: Community radio from Portland, Oregon
from KBOO-FM
• New Hampshire Public Radio: 86 interviews and
speeches from candidates in New Hampshire
presidential primaries from 1996 to 2012
• Southern California Public Radio: Award-winning stories
chronicling endangered species and environmental
issues in California
• Vision Maker Media: Native American films for public
broadcasting
• WNET: 67 NET programs
• Firing Line: metadata with URLs to online media from
Stanford University

22.
Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship

23.
AAPB can be of value for scholarship because of...
Geographical breadth
• to uncover ways that national and
global processes played out on the
local scene
Chronological reach
• to document change (or stasis) over time

24.
Documents...
national history
regional history
local history
news
public affairs
civic affairs
religion
social issues
science
education
environmental issues
music
art
literature
filmmaking
dance
poetry

25.
Genres…
debates
coverage of events
educational lectures
news reports
call-in radio shows
documentaries
local news and culture
magazines
talk shows
panel discussions
interviews
instructional programming

26.
The Importance of
Local History ...
“emphasis on diversity”
“the history of the nation is many different
stories, no one of which can be considered
the ‘main’ story”
a “skepticism about finding common
definitions of American nationalism or
discovering common values” among many
historians of the 1960s and 1970s
History from the bottom up
- Alan Brinkley, Political
Historian

27.
The Importance
of Local History
for...
“relating “national experiences to larger
processes and local resolutions.”
- Thomas Bender
Rethinking American History in a Global
Age (2002)

28.
AAPB can be of
value for
scholarship
because of…
scholarship pertaining to the period of 1973
onwards is “limited, fragmentary, and politically
conflicted”
for the 1980s, “the archival and monographic
work … has not yet been done”
accounts about the 1990s and later have “not
really been history”
- Kim Phillips-Fein, “1973 to the Present,”
in American History Now (2011)

29.
AAPB can be of value for scholarship because of...
Geographical breadth
• to uncover ways that national and
global processes played out on the
local scene
Chronological reach
• to document change (or stasis) over time

30.
News Magazines
More than 2,600 assets available in
the ORR
More than 7,331 in the collection
Covering 25 states
Over 39 organizations
From the 1970s – present

31.
News Reports
• Channel 17 Reports (Buffalo)
• The Evening Compass (Boston)
• Iowa Press
• MPR News (Minnesota)
• National Native News (Alaska)
• New Jersey Nightly News
• Newscheck (Southern California)
• Newsnight Maryland
• Ten O’Clock News (Boston)

32.
Call-in Radio
Shows 2,941 Assets
Importance: local
programs call out topics
of importance with the
community members
speaking to those issues
during that period.

33.
Documentaries
Moving Image 1,460
Sound 250
Top five topics:
History – 546
Local Communities – 471
Nature – 175
Social Issues - 163
Race and Ethnicity – 127

34.
Unedited interviews
6000+ interviews and other raw
materials
Importance: provides raw, full-length
accounts with historical figures and
witnesses of historic events, of which
only minutes are incorporated into the
edited films

35.
americanarchive.org
@amarchivepub
facebook.com/amarchivepub
@amarchivepub

36.
THANK YOU!