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Building a Digital Preservation Community in Public Broadcasting

Title (author1): 
Ms
First names (author1): 
Rebecca
Surname (author 1): 
Fraimow
Institution: 
WGBH
Country: 
UNITED STATES
Presentation type: 
panel session
Date: 
26 Sept Monday
Start time: 
1735
Venue: 
LoC Madison Building: Montpelier Rm.
Abstract: 

The rapid technological shift from tape-based to entirely digital technologies has had a dramatic impact on public media institutions in the United States. Public media stations are now creating hundreds of hours of complex born-digital video and audio files every day, which require active management in order to remain usable and accessible into the future. However, lacking the resources of commercial production environments, most of these organizations do not have a formal archive or funding to maintain professional archivists on staff. As a result, ensuring that public media environments have access to information and expertise about best practices in digital preservation is an ongoing challenge.

This panel will focus on efforts to develop a community of practice around digital preservation in public media institutions, as led by the American Archive of Public Broadcasting National Digital Stewardship Residents. Starting in August of 2016, seven residents will be engaging in a variety of digital preservation projects at public media stations, ranging from auditing the metadata schemas in use at Minnesota Public Radio, to developing workflows around the management of born-digital content at Howard University Television, to performing a full programmatic born-digital collections audit at CUNY TV.

Over the course of the panel session, the residents will discuss their projects and the commonalities of their experiences handling born-digital media across a variety of public media production environment. The residents will also discuss their experiences with tools designed to help address these challenges, such as the PBCore metadata standard for public media cataloging and the POWRR grid for preserving digital objects with restricted resources. AAPB NDSR Program Coordinator Rebecca Fraimow will join the panel to discuss the strategic goals of the National Digital Stewardship Residency program and ongoing initiatives to ensure that the public media community is able to connect to the knowledge available within the audiovisual preservation community.