This presentation was given by AAPB Project Director Karen Cariani at the 2014 Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) conference in Savannah, GA.
2. Tweeting during the
session?
Follow us at @amarchivepub or
use #AmericanArchive
3. What is the American Archive?
• A collaboration between WGBH and the
Library of Congress
• Historic collection of American public
radio and television content dating back
to the 1950s
4. • Identified over 3 million
items kept at stations,
archives, producers,
university collections
across the country
• 2.5 million inventory
records from 120 stations
• 40,000 hours of digital
material initially from over
100 stations
Initial Collection
5. Goals through
August 2015
• Ingest the 40,000 hours of digitized files into the LOC
systems
• Add 22,000 born-digital files to the collection
• Develop a website for public access to the 2.5 million
records from the inventory project
• Allow public access to proxy files on
location at WGBH and LOC
• Allow as much online access to the media as possible,
rights permitting, via the website
6. Long-Term Goals
• Grow the collection
• Help public media organizations with archiving, digitizing,
and access to their collections
• Build a consortium for preservation and access
of public media archive content
• Update existing records with richer descriptive data
• Further development of PBCore and broad adoption of
schema
• Develop on-line curated collections
• Identify opportunities for long-term sustainability
7. Speakers
• Casey Davis, WGBH AAPB Project Manager
– WGBH efforts to date
– Managing born digital files
• Lauren Sorenson, LOC AAPB Project Manager
– Update from LOC
• Nadia Ghasedi
– Washington University
• Margaret Bresnahan
– Minnesota Public Radio
Our 60 year preservation history, along with our interest in public access to our collections, made us a natural choice to be the home of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. Knowing WGBH’s expertise and track record in this archive space, the Library of Congress approached WGBH to partner and submit a joint proposal to CPB to become the future home of the American Archive. And we got it!
The project is ambitious. It aims to identify, preserve and make accessible as much content as possible created by the public media community dating back to the early 1950’s. The project takes advantage of each of the partners strengths. The Library of Congress will manage the preservation of the collections and WGBH will do what it does best - manage outreach to the stations and stakeholders in the community and provide as much public access as possible in the best way possible.
For many years WGBH, Sue in particular, in parallel with our own efforts here at WGBH, have been discussing with CPB the need to preserve the content created by the many public media stations across the country. After conducting a study and a pilot, an inventory was launched, which WGBH managed.
We had close to 300 institutions participate across the country – in every state including Guam and Puerto Rico. CPB funded about 120 stations to conduct an inventory of their collections. The inventory created 2.5 million records of specific tapes. Fyi – CPB expected us to locate about 100,000 items.
From these records, CPB funded 100 stations to nominate 40,000 hours to be digitized. The stations chose content important to them that needed to have digitized.
Our goals in the next 2 years are to get 40,000 hours of digital files into the LOC collection and systems. Create a website for public access, allow public access to the entire 40,000 hours on location at the LOC and WGBH, and allow as much public access on line as possible, rights permitting – much like we have done with Open Vault. We are very good at researching and clearing rights.