FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2015 Vienna

1. American Archive of
Public Broadcasting
Karen Cariani, WGBH
Casey E. Davis, WGBH
Alan Gevinson, Library of Congress

2. americanarchive.org
@amarchivepub
facebook.com/amarchivepu
b

3. Karen Cariani,
AAPB Project Director, WGBH
@kcariani

4. Joint collaboration between
WGBH and the Library of
Congress

5. • An unprecedented and historic collection
of American public radio and television
content
• Dates back through the 1950s
• Preserved and made available to the
public
What is it?

6. Who are we?
WGBH Media Library and Archives

7. Library of
Congress

8. © 2010 WGBH 8
Vision
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preserve and make accessible significant historical
content created by public media, and to coordinate a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.

9. • 40,000 hours of digital material
initially from over 100 stations
– 5,000 hours from born digital files
• 2.5 million inventory records from
120 stations
• Identified over 3 million items kept
at stations, archives, producers,
university collections across the
country
Initial
Collection

10. Challenges of born digital media
• Varying file formats
• File failure when moving the files from one
location to another – file corruption
• File naming
• Wrappers, codecs, bits, and more

11. Current Status
• Accession the 40,000 hours of digitized
files into the LOC systems
• Launched a website for public access to
the 2.5 million records from the inventory
project
• Public access to all proxy files on location
at WGBH and LOC

12. Launched New Projects
• NET Catalog
– Build a national inventory of titles created for
National Educational Television (pre-PBS)
• National Digital Stewardship Residency
– Expand the NDSR program to include
geographically diverse residencies at
organizations with pubic media collections

13. Newly Funded
• Collaboration with Pop-Up Archive
– Create transcripts of all 40,000 hours using
speech to text tools
– Create metadata games to improve
transcripts via crowdsourcing
– Create audio fingerprint database

14. Long term goals
• Grow the collection by adding new
inventory records and digitized materials
• Help public media organizations with
archiving, digitizing, and access to their
collections
• Build a consortium for preservation and
access of public media archive content

15. And PBCore!
• Responsible for further development of
PBCore
• AMIA PBCore Advisory Subcommittee
– Schema
– Documentation
– Education
– Website
– Communications

17. PBCore
• Continue the development of PBCore as a
standard for media materials
• Re-engage the PBCore community for input
in the continued development
• Out reach to new adopters of PBCore
• Collaborate with EBUCore to develop an
RDF ontology for PBCore

18. Next steps
• Allow public on-line access to as much as
possible, rights permitting, to the proxy files
– Check out website Nov 1!!!!
• Develop Sustainability plan
– Fundraise!
• Enhance website

19. Casey Davis,
AAPB Project Manager, WGBH
@caseyedavis1

20. Website Development

22. Website Development
• Initial launch in April 2015, with access to 2.5
million inventory records
• Responsive design, accessible on desktop, mobile
and tablet
• Further developing site to allow for streaming
video and audio in our Online Reading Room
• Now, all video and audio is accessible at WGBH &
Library of Congress through implementation of IP
restrictions

23. Data Audio and Video

24. https://github.com/WGBH/AAPB2

25. Metadata

26. • Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary
– Descriptive
– Administrative
– Technical/Instantiation
– Extensions
pbcore.org

28. Archival Management System
(AMS) github.com/avpreserve/ams
• Developed by AVPreserve
• LAMP stack application
• Licensed under GPLv3
• Create, store and manage descriptive, technical and preservation
metadata
• Stations can log-in and access their metadata and stream content
• Digitization vendor sends technical metadata to server using BagIt
specification; preservation metadata sent to server through Google
Spreadsheets API
• Provides PBCore and CSV import and export
• PBCore and PREMIS REST API

29. To fully catalog the AAPB collection, it would take one person
32 years working full time. So now we’re focusing on
normalization & MVC.
• AAPB Phases of Cataloging
– Inventory (item-level)
– Normalization: formatting dates, titles, splitting out types of titles;
formatting existing data at a high level in CSV
– Minimum Viable Cataloging (MVC): one-by-one cataloging, 15
minutes per item, spend most time reviewing opening and closing
credits; adding dates, titles, creators, contributors, publishers,
copyright information, topic, genre (format), and copyright
information. This will take approx. 6 years.
– Full Cataloging: I’ll come back as a volunteer and do this after I retire


30. Metadata
• Titles
• Contributing
Organization
• Identifiers
• Description
• Date
• Asset Type
• Genres
• Creators
• Contributors
• Publishers
• Media Type
• Copyright
• Duration
This is the
metadata we
expose to
users on the
public-facing
website at
americanarchiv
e.org.

31. Our advanced
search,
following the
Google model.

32. A way for
users to
explore the
collection by
geographic
location.

33. A way for
users who
don’t know
what they are
looking for to
dive in to the
collection

34. There’s a lot of
stuff on our site.
Keeping the
access facet
always
expanded w/
help text may
help users

35. Online Reading Room

37. Steps to Determining ORR Access
• October 2014 Rights Meeting: reviewed many of the challenges
facing access to moving image and sound archives. Read about it
here:
https://americanarchivepb.wordpress.com/2014/11/04/rightsme
eting/
• Reviewed existing agreements with stations
• Sent quit claims to donors – 75% signed
• Series-level “bucket analysis” – identified buckets, or categories, of
content, i.e., news magazine, live music performance, interviews
with public figures, event coverage, etc.
Decision: ORR or On Location

38. Alan Gevinson,
AAPB Project Director,
Library of Congress

39. The American Archive of Public Broadcasting
Access and Use
Place and Time

40. Access and Use:
Place
• Massachusetts: 27%
• Maryland: 11%
• Minnesota: 8%
• New York: 7%
• California: 6%
• New Jersey: 5%
• Montana: 4%
• South Carolina: 4%
• Illinois: 4%
• Wisconsin: 3%
• North Carolina: 2%
• Connecticut: 2%
• 38 states and 2 non-
states (DC and Guam)
submitted materials for
digitization
• Average percentage of
total per state (and non-
states): 1.5%
• 12 states (on right)
contributed above
average amounts
• 12 states did not
participate

41. Access and Use:
Place Region Assets %
• Northeast 19,202
31.1
• Mid-Atlantic 14,974 24.2
• Midwest 11,262 18.2
• West 8,187 13.3
• South 7,545 12.2
• Pacific (AK, HI, GU) 905
1.5
By Region

42. Access and Use: Time
Dates of creation or broadcast in 45% of 62,000 records
• nearly 1,000 files from the 1950s
• around 3,400 from the 1960s
• 2,900 from the 1970s
• 6,300 from the 1980s
• 7,800 from the 1990s
• and 6,800 from the 21st century

43. AAPB
• national history
• regional history
• local history
• news
• public affairs
• civic affairs
• religion
• education
• environmental issues
• music
• art
• literature
• filmmaking
• dance
• poetry
documents

44. AAPB can be of value for scholarship because of ...
Geographical breadth
• to uncover ways that
national and global
processes played out on
the local scene
Chronological reach
• to document change (or
stasis) over time

45. Scholars’
• “I have long been frustrated ... gaining
access to the vast audiovisual record of my
period”
• “content [is] held in relative obscurity by the
TV and radio networks and the public TV
stations”
• “programs remain almost impossible to
locate and access ... locked in the collections
of its many member stations”
• “Working to document recent American
history without access to the pictures has
been a real challenge”
• “key historical moments and events are lost
to us forever”
complaints

46. AAPB can be of value for scholarship because ...
• scholarship pertaining to the period of 1973 onwards is “limited,
fragmentary, and politically conflicted”
• for the 1980s, “the archival and monographic work … has not yet
been done”
• accounts about the 1990s and later have “not really been history”
Kim Phillips-Fein, “1973 to the Present,”
in American History Now (2011)

47. The Importance of
Local History ... • “emphasis on diversity”
• “the history of the nation is many
different stories, no one of which
can be considered the ‘main’
story”
• a “skepticism about finding
common definitions of American
nationalism or discovering
common values” among many
historians of the 1960s and 1970s
History from the
bottom up
(quotes from
Alan Brinkley)

48. The Importance of Local History for ...
• relating “national experiences to larger processes and
local resolutions.”
Thomas Bender
Rethinking American History in a Global Age (2002)

49. The Importance of Local Civil Rights History ...
• “publication of local and state studies ... marked a major shift in the
field”
• “called into question many of the top-down generalizations”
• “studying the importance of the movement’s local, indigenous base
fundamentally alters our picture of the movement and its
significance”
• a “bottom-up perspective” can expose “students to a world beyond
their immediate experience”
Emilye Crosby, ed.
Civil Rights History from the Ground Up (2011)

50. Civil Rights Movement
• Charleston, SC 1960
• Tallahassee, FL 1959-61
• McComb, MS 1961
• Baton Rogue, LS 1961
• Monroe, NC 1961
• Birmingham, AL 1963
• Yellow Springs, OH 1963
• Savannah, GA 1963
• St. Augustine, FL 1964
• MS Freedom Summer 1964
• Natchez, MS 1965
radio stories in AAPB from
...

51. Improving Scholarly Access to AAPB
• Create transcripts
• Enlist subject specialists to determine
searchable topics, key words, and phrases
• Enlist IT specialists to query transcripts using
subject specialist vocabulary
• Enhance display to relate programs from a
variety of localities and time periods