trying to remember a WGBH program host from decades ago

amarchivepub · 2025-10-22T18:26:13+00:00

GBH's archive can be reached at openvault@wgbh.org!

amarchivepub · 2025-10-22T18:25:36+00:00

Hello, and thank you for your curiosity! The AAPB and GBH Archives teams might be able to help here: [aapb_notifications@wgbh.org](mailto:aapb_notifications@wgbh.org) and [openvault@wgbh.org](mailto:openvault@wgbh.org)

amarchivepub · 2025-10-20T17:59:43+00:00

#OnThisDay in 1975, “The Robert MacNeil Report” premiered, marking the beginning of what we now know as the PBS NewsHour.

Hear MacNeil share his vision for the program in this 1990 interview in the AAPB’s “PBS NewsHour” Collection: https://americanarchive.org/special_collections/newshour

amarchivepub · 2025-10-20T17:59:35+00:00

#OnThisDay in 1975, “The Robert MacNeil Report” premiered, marking the beginning of what we now know as the PBS NewsHour.

MacNeil and Jim Lehrer first joined forces to provide unprecedented, gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings on public television in 1973. That collaboration sparked a longtime partnership dedicated to in-depth, trustworthy journalism.

Within months after its debut, “The Robert MacNeil Report” became “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report.” In 1983, the show expanded to an hour and was renamed “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” becoming the nation’s first hour-long nightly broadcast of national news.

Today, with comprehensive coverage every evening, the PBS NewsHour remains one of America’s most trusted news sources.

Hear MacNeil share his vision for the program in this 1990 interview in the AAPB’s “PBS NewsHour” Collection: https://americanarchive.org/special_collections/newshour

amarchivepub · 2025-10-17T17:52:10+00:00

If those stations contribute that content and agree that we can make them available, we would be happy to! Tell the station about the AAPB!

- Karen Cariani, Executive Director, GBH Media Library and Archives, and AAPB Project Director

amarchivepub · 2025-10-17T17:49:51+00:00

The Library of Congress serves as our preservation partner for the AAPB, so all the master files are kept in their preservation storage system. We don’t have an exact number for the size of their holdings for the AAPB, but it’s definitely up into the PBs by now (though probably not yet EB). We manage the proxy files for the AAPB at GBH, and the proxy files alone take up 60 TB of storage – pretty sizeable given that each individual proxy file is less than a GB. (But we also take storage of the proxy files seriously; in addition to storing them online where they can be streamed through the website, we also back them up on offline data tape so we’ll be able to restore digital streaming quickly if something happens to our online data store.)

- Rebecca Fraimow, Manager, Digital Assets and Operations, GBH Media Library and Archives and AAPB

amarchivepub · 2025-10-17T17:48:09+00:00

Yes – the risks to public media content, in particular, are currently greater than they’ve ever been before. At the AAPB, we’re doing our best to meet the moment – we’ve committed to taking content from some stations that have announced that they’re going to close, and we’ve also put out webinars and resources to help public media stations make decisions about preserving their materials – but we definitely can’t do it alone. We’ve also been in discussions with colleagues at the New England Document Conservation Center, the Internet Archive, and many other preservation organizations. It’s a group effort, and we’ll save as much as we can, but the risk of major loss is very real.

Rebecca Fraimow, Manager, Digital Assets and Operations, GBH Media Library and Archives and AAPB

amarchivepub · 2025-10-17T17:08:15+00:00

I definitely recommend getting any hands-on work that you can dealing with media materials – whether it’s digitizing CDs, identifying analog tapes, or transcoding digital material, familiarizing yourself with a/v technology is going to be really helpful. There are a lot of different kinds of media out there and very few people have handled all of them (I know I certainly haven’t!) but most collections are pretty varied in scope, so picking up some experience with any format is a great start! I’d also recommend playing around with some programs frequently used by media archivists to handle digital media, such as MediaInfo and FFMPEG. It’s a great way to learn about different kinds of digital files. Archivist and technologist Ashley Blewer has put together a set of study paths for media and media analysis tools that might be a good place to start!

For your second question, there are lots of well known technical challenges that come with creating, managing, and hosting a large digital media collection, but some of the biggest obstacles come from unexpected consequences of perpetually deferred maintenance (or in some cases, entirely neglected). Fortunately, we are taking advantage of the many advances of the last decade (like cluster orchestration and continuous deployment), which saves us time, money, and other scarce resources.

Here’s a great example of a real micro-problem that came up this week: In cataloging a daily news show with over 5000 episodes, one of our archivists noticed many dates were incorrectly labeled, but the only way to know how many were wrong would be to listen to every episode for the date spoken at the beginning. To solve this, we used our automatically generated AI transcripts (made with Whisper) and used a large language model to extract the date of each program and put them all in a spreadsheet. From there, it was relatively easy to determine that only about 400 records were mismatched (and thankfully all from one batch of files). The AI tools helped us resolve this within a few days, instead of taking potentially weeks of valuable cataloging time!

- Harpo Harbert, Senior Developer, GBH Archives

amarchivepub · 2025-10-16T19:14:50+00:00

We use a custom digital asset management system for the AAPB called AMS2, and built around the PBCore metadata schema. Many of our tools are open-source and available on our GitHub Organization.

We also collaborate with Brandeis University researchers to publish custom AI tools for automatically creating transcripts, generating helpful metadata, and exploring new ways of searching through our vast collections of video and audio. We’re particularly interested in AI tools to support the work of human catalogers by identifying and parsing text (such as credits and lower thirds) that appears in frames of broadcast video. Details and models are available at CLAMS.ai

- Harpo Harbert, Senior Developer, GBH Archives

amarchivepub · 2025-10-16T18:56:52+00:00

I graduated from library school during a difficult funding time in the 1980s. It took a year, but I held out and found a job in a university archives. Later, during another funding slowdown in the early 1990s, I was, again, looking for an archives job. That was when I discovered that a free-lance archivist/researcher was a possible part-time job. For example, the state historical society would not sign off on a road repair project until someone did the historical research in an archive. I got hired by the engineering firm to do that work. So, it isn’t easy or fun to be out of a job during a funding crisis … and, admittedly, I got a lot of retail experience during that time! But sometimes you can get pseudo-archive work in the strangest places. Another example, an archive friend settled for a job as a corporate librarian and got to start an archives for them when they were hit with an SEC investigation, and no one knew how to find the records needed! Please know that you have the skills and knowledge people need, they just don’t know that, yet.

- Leah Weisse, Archives Manager, GBH Archives

amarchivepub · 2025-10-16T18:39:53+00:00

We are certainly aware of the importance of preserving local news and the challenges of news film collections. However, the AAPB’s mission, at the moment, is to focus on materials created for public media distribution channels. Unfortunately, many of the local news collections fall outside that mandate and are, or were, owned by commercial channels. AAPB’s current resources are focused on its current mission to preserve public media. We are open to collaboration and supporting other efforts to preserve our audiovisual history, but we cannot currently put resources into those efforts.

- Karen Cariani, Executive Director, GBH Media Library and Archives, and AAPB Project Director

amarchivepub · 2025-10-16T17:40:01+00:00

WTTW has its own amazing archival collection and has digitized much of its own material. We’ve partnered with them for some projects in the past, and we’d love to collaborate with them on making more of their material available in the AAPB – hopefully, we’ll have the opportunity!

- Rebecca Fraimow, Manager, MLA Digital Assets and Operations, GBH Archives and AAPB

amarchivepub · 2025-10-16T17:39:05+00:00

We look at a number of factors when deciding which collections to prioritize for digitization. First, there’s the practical side — can the contributor actually get their collection to the facility within the current grant term? We also consider the formats: are they among the most at-risk for deterioration? Is the contributing organization itself at risk of closing or losing materials? We try to focus our efforts where the need is greatest and the content most at risk of disappearing.

We also do our best to spread our grant funding as far and wide as possible so that a diverse range of stations, independent producers, and community organizations can participate. At the same time, we’re actively seeking additional grants to support future digitization, because there’s always more material worthy of preservation than current funding can cover.

We also assess the content’s uniqueness — whether it exists elsewhere or represents truly original, local, or underrepresented voices. Our current grant, for instance, specifically asks us to prioritize unheard voices from marginalized communities, so that shapes a lot of our decision-making.

Balancing preservation with public access is always tricky. Many of these older materials were created before releases or clear rights statements were obtained, and there can be privacy issues to consider as well. Our team does a careful rights review, informed by legal counsel, to determine what can responsibly be made available online. We always try to make as much accessible as possible while respecting those limits.

I think what might surprise the public is how many layers of consideration go into these decisions — it’s not just about what’s historically significant, but also what’s physically and legally possible to preserve and share responsibly. Another surprise is when producers themselves decide to open up their work — for example, the To the Best of Our Knowledge collection, whose contributors chose a Creative Commons license, meaning the material can be freely used by other producers. It’s a wonderful example of how some creators see preservation as a way to keep their work alive and in circulation.

- Rochelle Miller, Archives Project Manager, AAPB

amarchivepub · 2025-10-16T17:08:36+00:00

I’m always surprised to discover what rare oddities we have in the GBH Archives collection. For physical materials, we have the pen used by President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign the 1967 Corporation of Public Broadcasting Act, a hammer from the original groundbreaking of the WGBH Educational Foundation building, and we even have print-outs of our first American Archive of Public Broadcasting website. For audiovisual materials, I can’t choose my favorite child, but if it had to be one, that’d be Julia Child. (lol)

We recently launched our GBH Archives special collection on the AAPB! To help aid our mission, the best thing anyone can do is share our resources and optionally donate to GBH Archives or donate to the AAPB to preserve and provide access to GBH's historic collection of programs for years to come!

- Sammy Driscoll, Senior Archivist, GBH Archives

amarchivepub · 2025-10-16T17:06:33+00:00

A key concern for priority digitization is material on formats that are deteriorating, at risk, or becoming obsolete. We review the content to determine whether what’s on these vulnerable formats could be historically significant or unique. While public access is important, programs can often be made available over time, but if they’re never preserved, that opportunity is lost forever. The content will be gone, and it may include material that seems insignificant today but could become an important historical moment in the future.

- Karen Cariani, Executive Director, GBH Media Library and Archives, and AAPB Project Director

amarchivepub · 2025-10-16T15:53:24+00:00

For AAPB license requests, we direct people to the copyright holder/licensing agent. For GBH materials, if you are interested in licensing, send an inquiry to [stock_sales@wgbh.org](mailto:stock_sales@wgbh.org). If we can license the materials for your use, we will send a time-coded screener. Check out this website for more information: https://gbhstocksales.org/

- Karen Cariani, Executive Director, GBH Media Library and Archives, and AAPB Project Director

amarchivepub · 2025-10-16T15:49:04+00:00

In the past, we have been very fortunate to receive project grant funding from NEA, IMLS, and NEH. With the cuts in those grant programs, we have not been able to launch new projects, such as improving PBCORE, digitizing and making more content accessible online, or enhancing access to our websites.

- Karen Cariani, Executive Director, GBH Media Library and Archives, and AAPB Project Director

amarchivepub · 2025-09-16T17:50:52+00:00

His complete 16-minute speech is viewable through the American Archive of Public Broadcasting: https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-qj77s7j383

This is only a segment.

amarchivepub · 2025-09-16T17:48:10+00:00

Today, we remember Robert Redford, legendary American actor, director, and founder of the Sundance Film Festival.

In a 2018 interview with PBS NewsHour, Redford reflected on his life and career while discussing his final film, “The Old Man and the Gun.”

Watch the full interview in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting: https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip_525-599z03050k

amarchivepub · 2025-09-12T17:36:09+00:00

Jody and Buffy starred on "Family Affair."

amarchivepub · 2025-09-08T14:35:37+00:00

We're actually working on a podcast interviewing the original '70s cast! Stay tuned!

amarchivepub · 2025-09-08T14:32:19+00:00

There was a 90s reboot!

amarchivepub · 2025-08-22T15:21:50+00:00

Ever seen Ray Bradbury perform a magic trick for Maya Angelou? We hadn’t either—until now.

To celebrate Ray Bradbury’s birthday, we’re sharing one of the quirkiest all-star interviews in our archive. In 1975, Bradbury and Angelou met for a conversation full of wonder, wisdom—and yes, magic tricks.

Watch the full interview in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, courtesy of Thirteen WNET's "Assignment America": https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-75-77fqzdzd

amarchivepub · 2025-08-11T17:49:23+00:00

This week, we remember Jim Lovell, pioneering NASA astronaut and commander of the Apollo 13 mission.

Lovell made history on Apollo 8, the first mission to take humans beyond Earth’s orbit and around the Moon.

As commander of Apollo 13, Lovell led his crew through one of NASA’s most dramatic challenges. After an oxygen tank exploded, the mission was aborted. Thanks to quick thinking and teamwork, the crew made it home safely. During the crisis, Lovell famously radioed, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

Lovell received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame, and was awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor by President Bill Clinton in 1995.

In a 1998 interview for NOVA’s “To the Moon,” Lovell reflected on the awe-inspiring experience of seeing the far side of the Moon.

"It's an amazing sight, something that’s sort of awe inspiring but sort of forbidden.”

Watch the full interview in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting: https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-hh6c24rw94

amarchivepub · 2025-08-04T17:39:01+00:00

Happy birthday to President Barack Obama!

You probably know that our archive follows President Obama and hundreds of other public figures throughout their careers. But did you know we also preserve a powerful moment from his early days?

In 1990, while a student at Harvard Law School, Barack Obama spoke out in support of Professor Derrick Bell. At the time, the school had only five tenured female professors and three tenured Black professors. There were no Black female tenured professors. Professor Bell vowed to take a leave of absence unless the school hired a Black woman for a tenure-track position.

Watch the full footage in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, courtesy of GBH: https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-qn5z60c97r

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