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Maximizing Access to Large Audio and AV collections: A Look at the American Archive of Public Broadcasting

Title (author1): 
Ms
First names (author1): 
Karen
Surname (author 1): 
Cariani
Institution: 
WGBH Educational Foundation
Country: 
UNITED STATES
Presentation type: 
panel session
Date: 
28 Sept Wednesday
Start time: 
1705
Venue: 
LoC Madison Building: Montpelier Rm.
Abstract: 

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting is a collaborative initiative between WGBH Educational Foundation in Boston, MA and The Library of Congress. We seek to coordinate a national effort to digitally preserve and make accessible significant at-risk historical U.S. public media content before it is lost to posterity. The initial collection of 40,000 hours was a combination of a large analog digitization project and the ingestion of about 5,000 hours of born digital content from over 100 organizations. The AAPB currently preserves the 40,000 hours of digital content and 2.5 million metadata records from 120 TV and radio stations across the U.S. All digital content is accessible on-site at WGBH and the Library of Congress, and approximately 5,000 hours are available online for research, educational, and informational purposes. The AAPB would like to share its experiences with the broader international audio-visual archive community. We plan to discuss the following topics: - managing a large scale digitization project and planning for reasonable growth - challenges of ingesting born digital content into a preservation system - launching a public website and engaging stakeholders to improve descriptive data for increased discoverability - resolving access issues using fair use and other legal doctrines - launching a fellowship program to place recent post-graduates into public media stations for their professional development and to aid stations in digital media preservation - engaging scholars to curate exhibitions for K-12, university, and general public educational uses - collecting and exposing metadata, however minimal, for discoverability - improving metadata using automation and computational tools.

Presenters:

Karen Cariani is the Director of the WGBH Media Library and Archives and oversees the staff responsible for the preservation and access of the WGBH Archive. Currently she is also project director for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting in collaboration with the Library of Congress. Karen will talk about the overall initiative challenges, successes, future plans and approach to intellectual property issues.

Casey E. Davis is Project Manager for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting at WGBH. Casey oversees the day-to-day activities of the initiative, coordinates with staff at WGBH and the Library on strategy and sustainability, oversees website development, and manages grants including the National Educational Television (NET) Collection Catalog Project and AAPB National Digital Stewardship Residency Project. Casey will discuss launching the website, continued access growth, and managing the born digital files.

Alan Gevinson, Special Assistant to the Chief of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center at the Library of Congress, is the Library’s project director for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. Alan will discuss scholarly access, the use of the collection as a set of data for scholars, and the creation of curated collections as access points.

Rachel Curtis is the American Archive of Public Broadcasting Digital Conversion Specialist and Project Coordinator at the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center. She oversees the ingestion of the preservation files into the Library systems. Rachel will talk about the challenges of the ingestion of digital files and required file formats.