The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) is a collaboration between the

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The libra ...

and WGBH Educational Foundation, founded through the efforts of the

Corporation for Public Broadcasting 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, ...

. 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. As of April 2020, 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. Funders include the

(CPB), the

Council on Library and Information Resources 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, an ...

, and

Institute of Museum and Library Services The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is an independent agency of the United States federal government established in 1996. It is the main source of federal support for libraries and museums within the United States, having the ...

History

The

(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. An advisory council, which included

Ken Burns Kenneth Lauren Burns (born July 29, 1953) is an American filmmaker known for his documentary films and television series, many of which chronicle American history and culture. His work is often produced in association with WETA-TV and/or th ...

, John W. Carlin,

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. (born September 16, 1950) is an American literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker, who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African Ame ...

Cokie Roberts Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne "Cokie" Roberts (née Boggs; December 27, 1943 – September 17, 2019) was an American journalist and author. Her career included decades as a political reporter and analyst for National Public Radio, PBS, ...

Stephen D. Smith Stephen D. Smith MBE is a Holocaust and genocide specialist who has designed, operated and consulted for many different Holocaust memorial centres. He currently holds the UNESCO Chair on Genocide Education. Early life Smith was born on 15 Ap ...

Margaret Spellings Margaret M. LaMontagne Spellings (née Dudar; born November 30, 1957) is an American government and non-profit executive who has been serving as President and CEO of Texas 2036 since 2019. She previously served as the eighth United States secret ...

, Howard Stringer, and Jesús Salvador Treviño, recommended that a collaboration between WGBH and the Library of Congress form and operate the archive. 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 The term born-digital refers to materials that originate in a digital form.NDIIPP"Preserving Digital Culture,"Library of Congress. This is in contrast to digital reformatting, through which analog materials become digital, as in the case of file ...

programs to be included in the collection. The collection will be made available to the public on-site in Washington, DC 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.

Other projects

Programs from

National Educational Television 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 ...

(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. The PBS NewsHour Digitization Project has made more than 13,500 episodes of

PBS NewsHour ''PBS NewsHour'' is an American evening television news program broadcast on over 350 PBS member stations. It airs seven nights a week, and is known for its in-depth coverage of issues and current events. Anchored by Judy Woodruff, the pro ...

and its predecessor programs available online. Transcripts of over 9,000 shows (1975–2015) will also be made available. Video excerpts of the NewsHour is included. 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. In 2020, the

University of Alabama The University of Alabama (informally known as Alabama, UA, or Bama) is a public research university in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Established in 1820 and opened to students in 1831, the University of Alabama is the oldest and largest of the publ ...

partnered with

WGBH WGBH may refer to: * WGBH Educational Foundation, based in Boston, Massachusetts, United States ** WGBH (FM), a public radio station at Boston, Massachusetts on 89.7 MHz owned by the WGBH Educational Foundation ** WGBH-TV WGBH-TV (channel 2), ...

to adopt and launch their own 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. 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.

Special Collections and Exhibits

The AAPB Special Collections include notable selections of public radio and television content with a specified search bar for items within the collection, a detailed summary about the content, and related resources. Some of these collections feature individual series such as Say Brother (now known as Basic Black), raw interviews from documentaries such as ''

Eyes on the Prize ''Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Movement'' is an American television series and 14-part documentary about the 20th-century civil rights movement in the United States. The documentary originally aired on the PBS network, and it als ...

'' and Ken Burns' ''

The Civil War (miniseries) ''The Civil War'' is a 1990 American television documentary miniseries created by Ken Burns about the American Civil War. It was the first broadcast to air on PBS for five consecutive nights, from September 23 to 27, 1990. More than 39 million ...

'', event coverage such as the

Watergate Hearings The Senate Watergate Committee, known officially as the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, was a special committee established by the United States Senate, , in 1973, to investigate the Watergate scandal, with the power to inve ...

, and selections of items related to specific themes, such as the

LGBT+ ' is an initialism that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. In use since the 1990s, the initialism, as well as some of its common variants, functions as an umbrella term for sexuality and gender identity. The LGBT term is ...

Collection. 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 the 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.

References

External links

*
Forgotten radio show offers view into Durand’s past
Rich Tupica, Argus-Press, September 4, 2016.
How segregationists sold their message on US television
University of Leicester, August 31, 2016.
Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship (PBPF)RadioSurvivor Podcast #218: Archiving Public Media
November 7, 2019.
Aca-Media Podcast, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Episode 53: Just a Plain Curiosity
March 19, 2020.
RadioSurvivor Podcast #301: Digitizing & Transcribing the Archives of NYC Progressive Church Radio
June 9, 2020.
"Creating Transcripts from Primary Sources"
''The Primary Source Podcast'', January 4, 2021.
"Pairing Picture Books and Primary Sources: The Teachers March!"
''The Primary Source Podcast'', January 18, 2021. {{Authority control Archives in the United States Public broadcasting in the United States

History

Other projects

Special Collections and Exhibits

See also

References

External links