New Mexico PBS and American Archive of Public Broadcasting staff present on collaborative grants with stations large and small to preserve programs and original materials contributed by 125 TV and radio stations, archives, and producers in New Mexico. Access the recording by visiting PBS Hub and creating a free account at https://hub.pbs.org/posts/engage-your-community-to-celebrate-your-history?parentId=6881.

1. EngageYour Community to
CelebrateYour History with the

2. Speakers
•Karen Cariani, WGBH & AAPB
•Casey Davis Kaufman, WGBH & AAPB
•Franz Joachim, New Mexico PBS
•Michael Kamins, New Mexico PBS

3. 20+ years ago…
Public television has been responsible for the production,
broadcast, and dissemination of some of the most important
programs which in aggregate form the richest audiovisual
source of cultural history in the United States. . . . [I]t is still
not easy to overstate the immense cultural value of this unique
audiovisual legacy, whose loss would symbolize one of the
great conflagrations of our age, tantamount to the burning of
Alexandria’s library in the age of antiquity.
-Television andVideo Preservation (1997), a Library of Congress report

4. The Imperative Need for Preservation
• The audiovisual records of the 20th century
are increasingly at risk.
• The Library of Congress has estimated that
there remains a 10 year window of
opportunity for preservation of magnetic
media.
• CPB launched the American Archive with
40,000 hours of digital files and gave
stewardship to Library of Congress and
WGBH
Can you guess who this is?

6. A collaboration between the Library of Congress
and WGBH to coordinate a national effort to
preserve and make accessible historically significant
public radio and television programming that has
aired over the past 70+ years.
Mission

7. Shared Responsibilities
• Overall governance
• Policy
• Collection development
• Ingest
• Rights decisions
Preservation Access and Outreach
AAPB Collaboration
Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation

8. • Coordinate a national effort to preserve and make accessible as much significant
public broadcasting materials as possible
• Become a focal point for discoverability
• Provide standards and best practices for storing, processing, preserving, and
making accessible historical content
• Facilitate the use of archival content by scholars, educators, students, journalists,
media producers, researchers, and the public
• Increase public awareness of the significance of historical public media and the
need to preserve it and make it accessible
Goals

9. • More than 100,000 items of digitized and born
digital material from over 100 public broadcasting
stations and organizations
• >2.5 million inventory records from 120 stations
• Public access to the full collection of video and
audio on-site at WGBH and the Library of
Congress
• Website at www.americanarchive.org
• Launched October 2015
• Features complete inventory records and
>50,000 streaming video and audio files in an
Online Reading Room (47% of full collection)
Collection

11. 1 - Preservation Consultation
2 – Access to AAPB’s Archival Management
System (AMS)
3 – Ability to customize your organization’s
landing page on americanarchive.org
4 - Grant Writing Assistance
5 – Access to preservation resources
6 – Communication toolkits
7 - Transcripts
8 – Digitization opportunities
9 – We refer licensing inquiries back to you
directly
Resources for Participating Organizations
@amarchivepub

12. #PBSAM | @amarchivepub
Special Collections
• Featured notable collections
• Finding aid provides detailed
information about the content
• Collection Summary
• Collection Background
• Recommended search strategies
• Related resources
americanarchive.org/special_collections

13. Exhibits
• AAPB staff and guest curators create
exhibits of selected recordings
• Focus on cultural and historical
significance
• themes
• topics
• events
• Curators contextualize digitized
primary and secondary sources of
public television and radio materials
americanarchive.org/exhibits

14. Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship (PBPF)
Fall 2019 Fellowships
Teaching the next generation of archivists to digitize and catalogue at-risk public media collections!
• WCVE (Richmond,VA)
• WSRE (Pensacola, FL)
• Center for Public Television and
Radio (University of Alabama)

16. The Challenge is Simple!
George Blood will provide FREE
DIGITIZATION to AAPB’s participating
stations once they have corrected their
computer-generated transcripts in AAPB’s
FIX IT+ platform.
– Goal: 20-100 corrected transcripts
– Ends: December 2019

17. Community outreach!

18. Social Media Outreach
KYUK (Bethel, AK)
Louisiana Public Broadcasting Nashville Public Television
PBS NewsHour
KOPN Columbia Missouri
Library of Congress

19. TheValue of AAPB Participation
• There is no cost to participating
• Copies preserved long-term at the Library of Congress
• No need to manage your own access platform and media servers
• Access to the AAPB’s Archival Management System (metadata repository) to search,
manage, update, and access your records and media
• Your collection becomes part of a national initiative and has broader reach
• AAPB archivists provide guidance and project management support during digitization
project s
• Collection could be included in AAPB initiatives such as transcript creation,
crowdsourcing, automated metadata creation

20. How to get Started
• Start with an inventory
spreadsheet
• What formats do you
have?
• How many tapes per
format?
• What shape are they in?
• Is there any information
about them?

21. Core information to capture, if possible
• Unique identifier – make sure the media is clearly labeled!
• Location (box number, shelf, storage unit, etc.)
• Title
• Date – aired or recorded
• Physical Format
• Duration
• Ideal: duration of content
• Good enough: length of tape
• Condition of the tape
• Is it a master?
• Any other descriptive information you can glean from the tape label
Inventory spreadsheet template:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/americanarchive.org/resources/pbcore_excel_template.xls

22. Who can do this
work?
• Undergraduate student interns
• Archives/Information Science
graduate student interns
• Public Broadcasting Preservation
Fellows
• Station volunteers
• Station alumni
• Hired archivist

23. Once you have an inventory, then what?
• Now you have the information you need to
digitize
• Benefits of doing the work in house
• Tapes don’t have to leave the premises
• Smaller collection - it’s probably cheaper
• Helps build expertise internally
• More control over the process
• Considerations for having a vendor do the work
• Bulk work that will be faster and possibly
cheaper
• Costs decrease with large collections
• QC by vendor is generally better
• But you have to pay them

24. Deciding what to digitize:
What’s at risk?
• Certain formats deteriorating
quickly:
• Video: 2 inch, ½ inch, 1 inch, ¾
inch (Umatic), D1, D3, DVC Pro,
MiniDV
• Audio: Cylinders, Lacquer and
aluminum disks, open reel
audio (1/4”)
• Playback equipment for many
formats becoming obsolete
and hard to find
Prioritization of audiovisual formats based on technical needs:
https://www.nedcc.org/fundamentals-of-av-preservation-textbook/chapter-2-inventory-and-assessment/chapter-2-section-3

25. Deciding what to digitize: Historical Significance
• Unique content
• Content that has not been widely distributed or preserved elsewhere
• Content created and owned by station
• Content that documents events, topics, places, persons, opinions, or attitudes
of historical, cultural, political, sociological, anthropological, scientific,
educational, technological, or aesthetic significance
• Content that reflects significant international, national, regional, state, or local
culture, politics, or society; or presents the viewpoints of indigenous
communities, subcultures, societal groups, or population segments
• Content with a significant impact when first broadcast
• Content that has received awards
• Raw footage, including interviews, that are unique and represent significant
historic events, or some unique aspect of the local community

26. Developing an RFP for digitization
• Explanation and goals of the project
• Detailed breakdown of what will be
digitized
• Staffing expectations
• Workspace and technical
requirements
• Expected quality control procedures
• Shipping expectations
• Inspection and cleaning protocols
• Target audio/video formats
• Naming conventions
• Closed captioning
• Technical metadata requirements
• Required storage media and delivery
• File package organization
• Checksum requirements
• Proposed schedule
• Review windows
• Replacement policy
• Budget for extraordinary
intervention
• Other costs to include or exclude

27. Vendor Relations and the RFP
• AAPB can provide a template RFP for stations that want to
preserve copies with AAPB.
• We can work with you to review proposals submitted by vendors
with quotes for your project.
• We can recommend several service providers with whom we’ve
worked on other projects.

28. Preservation considerations
• Target file format for preservation
• 10-bit JPEG2000 reversible 5/3 in a .MXF Op1a wrapper
• Library of Congress recommended format
• JPEG 2000 is an international standard (ISO 15444)
• MXF developed and supported by SMPTE
• FFv1 Matroska file Version 3
• Open source, non-proprietary, and hardware independent
• Roughly 65% less data than uncompressed V210 codec
• Aligned with FFmpeg, a well established, widely used and open source cross-platform
solution to record, convert and stream audio and video
• Offers rich and flexible support for embedded metadata
• Target file formats for production
• Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe
• Store locally and at two other geographically distributed locations on
different media

29. Storage

30. NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation
• National Digital
Stewardship Alliance
(NDSA) Levels of Digital
Preservation provide a
tiered set of
recommendations for
organizations to build or
enhance preservation
activities.
• Preservation isn’t all or
nothing
https://ndsa.org/activities/levels-of-digital-preservation/

31. Creating preservation policies
• What metadata is important to capture and manage?
• What are your target digital formats?
• How will you store your digital files?
• What are your plans for quality control?
• How will you ensure security and integrity of files?
• Who is responsible for decision making?
• What are your plans for professional development of staff?
• How will you provide access to your archive?
• What is your plan for evaluation and updating of your policies?
• Who can you partner with to ensure that you can achieve your goals?

32. Cataloging: making your collection more
searchable
• Once digitized, you can further catalog your collection, or enhance the
descriptive information of each item.
• We recommend following PBCore cataloging best practices:
http://pbcore.org
• Cataloging may include:
• Verifying existing inventory data (titles, dates, etc.)
• Adding creator and contributor information
• Writing short descriptions
• Adding topics and genres
• Adding copyright information
• AAPB PBCore Cataloging Guidelines:
https://americanarchivepb.wordpress.com/2015/03/05/aapb-cataloging-
guidelines-available/

33. How to store your catalog records?
• Spreadsheets
• Databases/Content
Management Systems
• FileMaker, Access
• ProTrack
• PBCore Cataloging Tool:
http://pbcore.org/catalogin
g-tool
• Collective Access
• Omeka

34. Grant programs
• Council on Library and Information Resources Recordings at Risk
• https://www.clir.org/recordings-at-risk/
• Next call for proposals opens Nov. 1, proposals due Jan. 31!
• Council on Library and Information Resources Digitizing Hidden
Collections
• https://www.clir.org/hiddencollections/
• National Endowment for the Humanities’ Humanities Collections and
Reference Resources (HCRR)
• https://www.neh.gov/grants/preservation/humanities-collections-and-
reference-resources
• National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC)
• https://www.archives.gov/nhprc/announcement
• Local foundations or donors

35. AAPB Grant Proposal Toolkit & Support
• Digital preservation plan
• Discoverability plan
• Project plan and timeline
• Digitization RFP
• Technical plan
• Draft job description for Archivist/Project Manager position
• Letter of support
• Help with writing narratives

36. FAQ
Q: Will my station be able to retain copyright ownership to our collection?
A: Yes, though you are donating the digital copies to AAPB, you can retain
copyright ownership.
Q: Will we automatically make all of your content available online?
A: No, we need your permission first. Then, we will follow our policies to
determine what we are comfortable making available online. We do prioritize
collections that are more likely to go in the Online Reading Room.
Q: What happens if a researcher or producer wants to license my content?
A: We refer them back to you.

37. Why get involved in the AAPB?
• So that your station can begin to identify, manage and preserve your
collection
So that other producers can find and potentially license your content
So that scholars can refer to your content in their research
So that educators and students can access your content as primary source
material
So that lifelong learners can watch and listen to the programs they remember
from the past
Your station has created an archival record of your community and our shared
cultural heritage. Making this historic content available fulfills public media’s
core mission to educate, inspire, and enlighten.

38. Get involved in the archiving community!
Association of Moving Image Archivists
2019 Conference: Nov. 13-16, Baltimore
Website: amianet.org
Association for Recorded
Sound Collections
Website: arsc-audio.org
Radio Preservation Task Force
Website: radiopreservation.org

39. The need is imminent

41. Additional Resources
• Lots of resources available on the AAPB website!
• https://americanarchive.org/resources
• ARSC Guide to Audio Preservation
• https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub164
• NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation
• http://ndsa.org/activities/levels-of-digital-preservation

42. Thank you!
Karen Cariani – karen_cariani@wgbh.org
Casey Davis Kaufman – casey_davis-Kaufman@wgbh.org
Franz Joachim – fjoachim@nmpbs.org
Michael Kamins – mkamins@nmpbs.org