Building AAPB Participation into Digitization Grant Proposals: Requirements, Recommendations and Workflows

Editor's Notes

• #5: It’s a collection of radio and tv materials created by or for public tv and radio in the US dating back to the 1950’s to be preserved for historical purposes and for access by the public.
• #6: Who are we? WGBH is Boston’s Public television station. We produce fully one third of the content broadcast on PBS, including the series you see here, as well as Downton Abbey and Sherlock. In addition to television, we have 2 radio stations and a large, award winning Interactive department that is the number one producer for the sites you’ll find on PBS.org. As you can see, we produce a wide variety of programming from public affairs, to history and science, to children’s program, arts, culture, drama and how to’s. We have been on the air since 1951 with radio and 1955 with television. At heart and through our mission we are an educational and cultural institution. We originated out of a consortium of academic universities in the Boston area. Because we have produced so much we have a large archive of educational programming that is of interest to scholars and researchers, in addition to the public.
• #7: Project is a collaboration between the Library of Congress and WGBH. The Library will oversee the long term preservation of the digital files.
• #9: The American Archive of Public Broadcasting seeks to preserve and make accessible significant historical content created by public media, and to coordinate a national effort to save at-risk public media before its content is lost to posterity. Our mission and goals are challenging. In addition to preserving, we want to assure discoverability, and access. We want to guide and support current content creators and stewards of the materials with best practices to protect this historic programming. We want to facilitate the use of the materials and increase public awareness of it’s importance. And of course we want to be able to sustain these goals into the future.
• #10: For a national level collaboration such as the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, trust and partnership is also very important. WGBH is dependent on the Library of Congress to make this initiative work. We could not take on the preservation of all the digital files. Likewise, the Library benefits from WGBH’s contacts with stations and the public media community and experience with making media materials accessible. Similarly WGBH can apply for grants that the Library cannot, and through our collaboration we have received grants that support positions at the Library of Congress to continue our work. WGBH is one of the biggest public media powerhouses within the public media community, but sometimes that causes a lack of trust among smaller stations. Working with the Library of Congress, this has helped to build our credibility as an archive. And among our “core team” of administrators at WGBH and the Library, we each have strengths and weaknesses that complement each other. As collaborators of an initiative that is also coordinating many other entities across the country, we need to trust each other and be in agreement about what we want to accomplish and how to move forward. We also need to be able to act independently when we see it benefits the project. We are two institutions that have other agendas and priorities, move at different paces, and have different concerns. It can slow a project down, but we can also learn from each other. We can particularly learn patience! Face to face meetings are harder and more infrequent, although we can take advantage of various meetings and conferences to get together, most communication is over the phone or via e-mail, which we all know can sometimes lead to misunderstandings and mistrust. Its’ much easier to trust someone who is standing in front of you, than to trust a voice over a black box. Looking someone in the eye, face to face is very powerful connection, and you can’t do it with an e-mail, or skype.
• #12: CASEY The output of large digitization project that CPB funded immediately before the AAPB was created became the AAPB’s initial collection. Stations that participated in the inventory had the opportunity to choose items to be digitized – items important to them, or items that the only way they might find out what it is is by digitizing and watching or listening to it. In addition, about 5,000 hours of already-digital content was identified to be added to the collection. The collection now consists of 50,000 hours of content from over 100 organizations.
• #24: AAPB hopes to provide a centralized web portal of discovery where researchers, educators, students – really anyone – can find relevant public broadcasting programs existing either on our own site or on sites belonging to other archives and stations. With approximately 1,250 public radio and television stations in existence, one access point will aid scholars interested in researching how national or even international topics have been covered in divergent localities over the past 60+ years. AAPB has made a start at becoming that portal. If stations and archives operating their own websites will send us metadata, we will provide direct links from AAPB to digitized files on the other sites. For a researcher, this would be one-stop shopping. This is how the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) operates, and we plan soon to make AAPB files accessible through searches on the DPLA website as well as on our own. We want to help solve the separate silos syndrome.
• #35: The first step, involving the appraisal inventory, usually happens before contracting. An inventory needs to happen before we can continue with ingestion. We have basic required item level metadata, which is pretty much just what is required to create a valid PBCore record. The unique identifiers are important, because we use those string to track assets throughout all of our systems and workflows.
• #42:  if stations/donors need replacement copies of their preservation files from LC, they will have to make requests through our Public Services Office (PSO) and there are fees for labor and media delivery.
• #47: HOPE Nb: not ISP protected by DMCA 512
• #48: Places and years thus are skewed favoring some states, some regions, and some decades over others. Even with these imbalances, this remains an extraordinarily diverse collection of programming covering many localities across the U.S. and much that occurred throughout the nation during the past 60+ years. The materials offer unique television and radio programming that document the subjects you see here.
• #49: Because of the geographic breadth of the material, researchers can use the collection to help uncover ways that national and even global processes played out on the local scene. The long chronological reach from the late 1940s to the present will supply researchers with previously inaccessible primary source material to document change over time.
• #50: Scholars who have supported our work have repeatedly complained about the lack of access to audiovisual materials. A historian of the civil rights movement has written to us, “I have long been frustrated by difficulty [of] gaining access to the vast audiovisual record of my period.” A media historian similarly writes that public broadcasting programs, “remain locked in the collections of its many member stations . . . Bringing them out of obscurity . . . would be an immense boon to scholars not only of media history but of the era as well.”
• #51: The material in the collection is especially important because of the era it reflects. There remains much basic excavation and interpretive work in recent American history for the present generation of scholars to accomplish. A recent essay noted that American history scholarship pertaining to the period of 1973 onwards is “limited, fragmentary, and politically conflicted.” Accounts about later periods, the author concluded, have “not really been history.”
• #52: The American Archive collection contains a wealth of material produced locally for local audiences. These programs represent an untapped important resource. During the 1960s and 1970s, many historians began to focus on social history, history from the bottom up, instead of on national elites. This “emphasis on diversity,” Alan Brinkley has written, presumed “that the history of the nation is many different stories, no one of which can be considered the ‘main’ story.”
• #53: More recently, some historians also have advocated for integrating the national story into wider contexts. The goal is to relate “national experiences to larger processes and also to local resolutions,” Thomas Bender has written.