The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) is a collaboration between the Library of Congress and WGBH Educational Foundation, founded through the efforts of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). The AAPB is a national effort to digitally preserve and make accessible historically significant public radio and television programs created over the past 70+ years. The archive comprises over 120 collections from contributing stations and original producers from US states and territories. [1] As of April 2020, [update] the collection includes nearly 113,000 digitized items preserved on-site at the Library of Congress, and 53,000 items in the collection are streaming online in the AAPB Online Reading Room. [2]
Funders include the CPB, the Council on Library and Information Resources, and Institute of Museum and Library Services. [3]
External videos | |
---|---|
General introduction and history | |
Casey Davis: Why Archive Public Media?, 2016, 19:48, GBH Forum Network [4] | |
Karen Cariani: The History of Public Media and the AAPB, 2016, 29:42, GBH Forum Network [5] |
External media | |
---|---|
Example of online content | |
Audio | |
The American Town: A Self-Portrait: Durand, Michigan, 1967, 29:50, American Archive of Public Broadcasting [6] | |
Video | |
Prospects of Mankind with Eleanor Roosevelt; What Status For Women?, 59:07, 1962. Eleanor Roosevelt, chair of the Commission, interviews President John F. Kennedy, Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg and others, WGBH Open Vault via AAPB [7] |
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) began inventorying US public media content in 2007. By 2013, 2.5 million items had been inventoried including 40,000 hours of broadcasting which was being digitized with funding from the CPB. [8] An advisory council, which included Ken Burns, John W. Carlin, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Cokie Roberts, Stephen D. Smith, Margaret Spellings, Howard Stringer, and Jesús Salvador Treviño, recommended that a collaboration between WGBH and the Library of Congress form and operate the archive. [9]
In the first phase of the project, which began in 2013, the Archive will complete the digitization of 40,000 hours of radio and television programs and select an additional 5,000 hours of born-digital programs to be included in the collection. The collection will be made available to the public on-site in Washington, D.C. and in Boston. A rights clearance strategy will be developed to comply with legal restrictions, including copyright law and a website will provide public access to much of the collection. [10]
Programs from National Educational Television (NET), which operated from 1952 through 1972, are being cataloged in a project scheduled to be completed in 2018. 8,000–10,000 NET titles are expected to be cataloged and an incomplete preliminary list is currently online. [11]
The PBS NewsHour Digitization Project has made more than 13,500 episodes of PBS NewsHour and its predecessor programs available online. Transcripts of over 9,000 shows (1975–2015) will also be made available. [12]
The Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship (PBPF) began in 2018 and supports graduate students enrolled in non-specialized programs to pursue digital preservation projects at public broadcasting organizations around the country. [13] In 2020, the University of Alabama partnered with WGBH to adopt and launch its model of the PBPF program, providing both local and remote students enrolled in the University of Alabama's School of Library and Information Studies with opportunities to pursue Fellowships at stations in their area. [14]
In 2021, the AAPB launched the “Presenting the Past" podcast series in collaboration with the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). The series features informed conversations with scholars, educators, industry professionals, researchers, archivists, and others about significant events, issues, and topics documented in the AAPB collections. [15]
The AAPB Special Collections [16] include notable selections of public radio and television content with a specified search bar for items within the collection, a detailed summary of the content, and related resources. Some of these collections feature individual series such as Say Brother (now known as Basic Black), [17] raw interviews from documentaries such as Eyes on the Prize and Ken Burns' The Civil War , [18] event coverage such as the Watergate Hearings, [19] and selections of items related to specific themes, such as the LGBT+ Collection. [20]
In the AAPB curated Exhibits, curators select primary and secondary source recordings to present a diversity of perspectives concerning the exhibit's focus. These exhibits illuminate how public broadcasting stations and producers have covered topics such as civil rights, climate change, speaking and protesting in America, public media and presidential elections, structuring news magazines, televising Black politics, and historic preservation on public broadcasting. [21]
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is an American publicly funded non-profit corporation, created in 1967 to promote and help support public broadcasting. The corporation's mission is to ensure universal access to non-commercial, high-quality content and telecommunications services. It does so by distributing more than 70 percent of its funding to more than 1,400 locally owned public radio and television stations.
The George Foster Peabody Awards program, named for the American businessman and philanthropist George Peabody, honor what are described as the most powerful, enlightening, and invigorating stories in all of television, radio, and online media. Because of their academic affiliation and reputation for discernment, the awards are held in high esteem within the media industry. The awards were conceived by the National Association of Broadcasters in 1938 as the radio industry's equivalent of the Pulitzer Prizes. Programs are recognized in seven categories: news, entertainment, documentaries, children's programming, education, interactive programming, and public service. Peabody Award winners include radio and television stations, networks, online media, producing organizations, and individuals from around the world.
Internet Archive is an American nonprofit digital library website founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle. It provides free access to collections of digitized materials including websites, software applications, music, audiovisual, and print materials. The Archive also advocates for a free and open Internet. As of February 4, 2024, the Internet Archive held more than 44 million print materials, 10.6 million videos, 1 million software programs, 15 million audio files, 4.8 million images, 255,000 concerts, and over 835 billion web pages in its Wayback Machine. Its mission is committing to provide "universal access to all knowledge".
National Educational Television (NET) was an American educational broadcast television network owned by the Ford Foundation and later co-owned by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It operated from May 16, 1954, to October 4, 1970, and was succeeded by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which has memberships with many television stations that were formerly part of NET.
Digitization is the process of converting information into a digital format. The result is the representation of an object, image, sound, document, or signal obtained by generating a series of numbers that describe a discrete set of points or samples. The result is called digital representation or, more specifically, a digital image, for the object, and digital form, for the signal. In modern practice, the digitized data is in the form of binary numbers, which facilitates processing by digital computers and other operations, but digitizing simply means "the conversion of analog source material into a numerical format"; the decimal or any other number system can be used instead.
WGBH-TV, branded GBH or GBH 2 since 2020, is the primary PBS member television station in Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 issued the congressional corporate charter for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a private nonprofit corporation funded by taxpayers to disburse grants to public broadcasters in the United States, and eventually established the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR). The act was supported by many prominent Americans, including Fred Rogers, NPR founder and creator of All Things Considered Robert Conley, and Senator John O. Pastore of Rhode Island, then chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, during House and United States Senate hearings in 1967.
The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) of the United States was an archival program led by the Library of Congress to archive and provide access to digital resources. The program convened several working groups, administered grant projects, and disseminated information about digital preservation issues. The U.S. Congress established the program in 2000, and official activity specific to NDIIPP itself wound down between 2016 and 2018. The Library was chosen because of its role as one of the leading providers of high-quality content on the Internet. The Library of Congress has formed a national network of partners dedicated to preserving specific types of digital content that is at risk of loss.
The Public Radio Exchange (PRX) is a non-profit web-based platform for digital distribution, review, and licensing of radio programs. The organization is the largest on-demand catalogue of public radio programs available for broadcast and internet use.
In conservation, library and archival science, preservation is a set of preventive conservation activities aimed at prolonging the life of a record, book, or object while making as few changes as possible. Preservation activities vary widely and may include monitoring the condition of items, maintaining the temperature and humidity in collection storage areas, writing a plan in case of emergencies, digitizing items, writing relevant metadata, and increasing accessibility. Preservation, in this definition, is practiced in a library or an archive by a conservator, librarian, archivist, or other professional when they perceive a collection or record is in need of maintenance.
World Channel, also branded as World, is an American digital multicast public television network owned and operated by the WGBH Educational Foundation. It is distributed by American Public Television and the National Educational Telecommunications Association and features programming covering topics such as science, nature, news, and public affairs. Programming is supplied by the entities, as well as other partners such as WNET and WGBH. It is primarily carried on the digital subchannels of PBS member stations.
Latino USA is a nationally syndicated public radio program and podcast produced by The Futuro Media Group and distributed nationwide by the Public Radio Exchange (PRX), after 27 years of being distributed by NPR. The program is anchored by Maria Hinojosa.
Basic Black is a weekly television series airing on WGBH in Boston. Originally known as Say Brother, the show was created in 1968 and aims to reflect the concerns and culture of African Americans through short-form documentaries, performances, and one-on-one conversations.
The Vanderbilt Television News Archive, founded in August 1968, maintains a library of televised network news programs. It is a unit of the Jean and Alexander Heard Library of Vanderbilt University, a private research university located in Nashville, Tennessee. It is the world's most extensive and complete archive of television news.
The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and non-commercial, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly funded nonprofit organization and the most prominent provider of educational programs to public television stations in the United States, distributing shows such as Frontline, Nova, PBS News Hour, Masterpiece, Sesame Street, and This Old House.
The Public Broadcast Laboratory (PBL) was a television program broadcast in the United States, created on November 5, 1967, by National Educational Television (NET). The program was considered a live Sunday-night magazine program. In 1969, the Ford Foundation withdrew support and the series was cancelled.
The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) is an American independent, nonprofit organization. It works with libraries, cultural institutions, and higher learning communities on developing strategies to improve research, teaching, and learning environments. It is based in Alexandria, VA, United States. CLIR is supported primarily by annual dues from its over 180 sponsoring institutions and 190 DLF members, and by foundation grants and individual donations.
The Louisiana Digital Media Archive (LDMA) is an archive containing both the Louisiana State Archives' Multimedia Collection and the Louisiana Public Broadcasting (LPB) Digital Collection. It endeavors to preserve as well as provide public access to both collections. The LDMA is the first media collections collaboration between an American state archives and a public broadcaster. It also contributes to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. The LDMA contains thousands of hours of media documenting over 50 years of Louisiana history, including glimpses of the state's endangered and remote communities and locales as well as interviews with notable Louisianians, such as artists, civil rights activists, military personnel, politicians, and writers.
Produced at KUT, In Black America is a long-running, nationally syndicated program dedicated to all facets of the African American experience. John L Hanson Jr. profiles a diverse selection of current and historically significant figures whose stories help illuminate life in Black America. Guests include civil rights leaders, educators, artists, athletes and writers describing their experiences, achievements and work in chronicling and advancing the quality of African American life.
Samuel C. O. Holt is a radio and television executive who made significant contributions to the early development of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio. As the first programming director at PBS, Holt helped created such programs as Masterpiece Theatre and The MacNeil-Lehrer Report. When NPR was formed in 1970, the leadership of the network followed many of the recommendations in Holt's report, Public Radio Study, which urged noncommercial radio stations to “think about being something other than ... a classical music turntable.”