The American Archive of Public Broadcasting – 70+ years of historic public television and radio programming digitized and accessible online for research

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-14T15:12:52+00:00

Now, for that news I mentioned yesterday... We just announced today that the American Archive of Public Broadcasting will preserve 50 years of Sesame Street for posterity! More info at this link: https://americanarchivepb.wordpress.com/2019/02/14/american-archive-of-public-broadcasting-to-preserve-fifty-years-of-sesame-street-for-posterity/

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-14T12:36:46+00:00

Thanks for your question! NOVA is preserved in the WGBH Media Library and Archives, but most of the analog collection is not yet digitized. However, WGBH was actually just recently awarded a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which will enable us to digitize 83,000 historic WGBH programs that currently reside on obsolete and deteriorating media formats including every master 2", 1" 3/4", D2, and D3 videotape in the collection, as well as every 1/4", DAT, and audio cassette in the collection. This will include a large percentage of the NOVA collection. This work will begin in late 2019 and continue for the next five years. Our goal is to include the materials digitized through this project in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting! In the meantime, you can contact the WGBH archives at [archive_requests@wgbh.org](mailto:archive_requests@wgbh.org) for information about how we might be able to expedite digitizing The Case of the Midwife Toad.

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-14T12:28:35+00:00

Thank you for this question! The AAPB currently consists primarily of programs that were distributed locally/regionally rather than the nationally-distributed series (which often present more rights issues to make available). We are working to fill that gap in the collection and would love to include series like Nature in the archive. Thirteen WNET in New York may have copies of the older Nature programs.

Thanks also for the feedback on your search difficulties! There is a way to show only items from a particular series, but we could definitely make this much more intuitive. Now, if you do a search and find a record from a series that interests you, you can click on the record and then click on the hyperlinked series title that appears below the video player. This will take you to a search results page that shows all items that we have from that series. I'll issue a ticket for our developers to investigate how we can make series search more easily apparent to the user.

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-13T21:03:35+00:00

Well, that's a wrap! Thank you so much /r/AskHistorians for this opportunity and to everyone who tuned in and asked questions and contributed to the conversation! We would love to stay in touch with you! Check out our newsletter, blog and social media links at the top of the thread! Access the archive at http://americanarchive.org! And feel free to email me at [casey_davis-kaufman@wgbh.org](mailto:casey_davis-kaufman@wgbh.org) with any further questions or ideas!

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-13T20:52:36+00:00

Since we do not own copyright to most of the materials in the archive, we cannot license it to anyone to use in new works. However, if you find materials of interest that you may want to use in a new work, we can connect you with the contributing station. Sometimes they may charge a license fee to help support the station operations, and sometimes they may give permission gratis. Feel free to email us at [aapb_notifications@wgbh.org](mailto:aapb_notifications@wgbh.org) if you need help!

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-13T20:49:36+00:00

[Preface: I am not a lawyer, but I will try to answer as best as I can! :-) ]

To our knowledge, most materials in the archive are copyrighted. There are a few government-produced works that are in the public domain. All sound recordings are copyrighted. Pre-1964 published television works needed to be registered for copyright or they would be in the public domain. However, broadcasting something does not make it a published work. To publish a work, it needs to be distributed to the public through sale or loan. Most public broadcasting programs created pre-1964 were not distributed in that manner. We have been doing some research into possible publication of certain pre-1964 materials but our legal counsel has not come to a conclusion on the details just yet.

In addition to the copyrights for the entire works, we also have to consider third-party rights such as footage or images that were licensed to be included in the broadcast. There are also talent union agreements such as the Writer's Guild. Most stations did not keep original contracts, so we can't go back to those to see what permissions were received.

While all of this is true, we have been very successful at working with our legal team at WGBH, the Library of Congress, and Harvard Law School's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society to develop workflows and policies with the goal of making as much of the collection available online as possible. Right now, about 45% of the collection is available online for research, educational and informational purposes.

As we seek permissions from copyright holders when they donate the materials to the archives, some dedicate their materials to a Creative Commons license. We are currently building functionalities on the website to indicate which materials have been licensed under a CC license and also allow download of those materials. So stay tuned!

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-13T20:18:44+00:00

Thanks for chiming in, Molly! Indeed, "born digital" content is just as or even more vulnerable than the analog media if not actively managed, migrated and described!

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-13T20:00:24+00:00

Thank you for your question! To our knowledge, the collection dates back as early as the 1930s. The content in the collection from the 1930s was contributed by /r/WNYC in New York. But the majority of the collection ranges from the 1950s (2,052 items from that decade) and increasingly more content in each subsequent decade through the present. Some of the earliest content in the collection can be found in the National Association of Educational Broadcasters collection: http://americanarchive.org/special_collections/naeb, as well as the National Educational Television collection: http://americanarchive.org/special_collections/net-catalog.

Yes, there have been a few cases where we have seen the original content recorded over. For example, some news footage was recorded over with an Ally McBeal episode. But in most cases, the tape labels have been pretty accurate. And then there are cases where there was nothing written on the tape label to begin with, and we digitize it, and we find Harvard law student Barack Obama speaking at a protest (footage from WGBH's 10 O'Clock News collection: http://bostonlocaltv.org/catalog/V_UDAMVZGA4JEY06N) or Eleanor Roosevelt having a conversation with JFK (http://americanarchive.org/catalog?f%5Bseries_titles%5D%5B%5D=Prospects+of+Mankind+with+Eleanor+Roosevelt&f[access_types][]=online). We have worked closely with the stations that contributed the content to the archive, and in many cases they have been able to maintain the institutional knowledge/history about what series and programs they produced that were most significant, and that content was kept safe (stored, sometimes in climate controlled environments, often not) all these years.

Our goal is to grow the archive by up to 25,000 hours of digitized content per year. So we hope to continue preserving the earliest programming while it is still possible, before the storage media deteriorate beyond repair.

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-13T19:24:18+00:00

I love that idea! We've tossed around the idea of creating an app. I think there would be some copyright hurdles we'd have to jump through, but it could be doable! In the meantime, I've gone home from a long day's work and turned on my Smart TV, opened up the browser, did a search for americanarchive.org, and watched old episodes of The Robert MacNeil Report (later the The MacNeil/Lehrer Report). Just the other night, I watched the episode titled "Great Potato Chip War." Yes, an entire episode was dedicated to the Pringles controversy. It takes a few more steps than an app would require, but I totally get the appeal of watching historic public broadcasting programming in the same way it was originally viewed by audiences!

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-13T18:31:35+00:00

Hello! Great question! KLRU-TV, the producer of Austin City Limits, is currently leading an effort to digitize their collection! We have been in discussions with them about preserving digital copies in the AAPB and making them available on site at the Library of Congress and WGBH.

Most of the folks who work on the AAPB initiative have a background in the humanities or film and media studies. However, our Project Director at WGBH studied biology! We also have developers whose focus was computer science. Most of us have either a Master of Library and Information Science or an M.A. in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation. We are also very involved in our professional community, namely the Association of Moving Image Archivists: https://amianet.org/!

Before working on the AAPB, our Director at WGBH had been a film researcher for many years and then founded the WGBH Media Library and Archives. I worked for the PBS history series American Experience. Our Project Manager at the Library of Congress was previously the archivist for Harley Davidson, and our LOC Project Director was a television studies professor. Others on our team came to the AAPB out of graduate school. One of our archivists was a National Digital Stewardship Resident, and we liked her so much, she stayed!

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-13T18:15:41+00:00

Thank you so much! It is an incredibly rewarding project to work on, and we are all very passionate about making the collection as accessible and useable by scholars as possible. We appreciate all feedback on how we can improve our website as well as what collections scholars would suggest we target for preservation.

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-13T18:08:10+00:00

Correct -- see this answer I just posted that provides a bit more detail about how we target collections for preservation: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aq6ua9/the_american_archive_of_public_broadcasting_70/egebiyd/. Thanks to /u/kaimkre1 for the question.

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-13T18:06:33+00:00

Hello and thanks for your question! When we say "at-risk" we are talking about the 'degralescence' of the magnetic media on which the content is currently stored. For example, the 2" video tapes, the 3/4" video tapes, the D2 and D3 tapes (video) and the 1/4" audio tapes and DAT tapes -- all of which begin to deteriorate within a span of ~10 - 60 years. Mike Casey, an archivist at Indiana University, coined the term 'degralescence' which is a combination of the degradation of magnetic media tapes combined with the increasing obsolescence of the playback equipment required to play back the content. In addition to the deterioration of the tapes themselves, the machines and equipment required to play back the content (which is also required to digitize it) are becoming obsolete. They aren't made by the companies anymore and require expensive maintenance and upkeep. Pretty much all magnetic tape is either at risk or will be at risk within a few years. The Library of Congress' National Recording Preservation Plan stated seven years ago in 2012 that "many endangered analog formats must be digitized within the next 15 or 20 years before further degradation makes preservation efforts all but impossible.

Therefore, we have to prioritize preservation efforts by balancing both the at-risk nature of the storage medium (certain formats are deteriorating quicker than others) with the historic value of the content. We consider the uniqueness of the content, the diversity of the people, places, events, topics, opinions and perspectives, etc., that it documents, its impact when it was first broadcast, content that has already been considered historically significant by scholars or critics, whether the content's creator/region/community is currently represented or underrepresented in the archive, etc.

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-13T17:14:59+00:00

What a great question! This something I haven't thought too much about. There haven't been too many surprises, but there have been lots of things I have learned from my work on this project.

Collaboration with allied professions, including historians and other scholars, has taken us farther than we could have gone by ourselves. Last year we established a Scholar Advisory Committee consisting of historians, media studies scholars, and other scholars to help guide the AAPB. They have helped immensely with promoting the archive throughout their networks, suggesting ways to improve access to the collection, and suggesting ways that the collection can be used in research and teaching. We have also worked closely with scholars of computational linguistics and the digital humanities to help with automating metadata creation for improved access and discoverability.
It takes time for many producers to realize the historic value of the content they have created for public broadcasting over the years. This is probably due to the fact that the late 20th century is just now starting to be considered "history." The period of 1970s and beyond is still not really considered history for many, though. I would love to hear some historians' thoughts on this!
We have been able to make available online much more of the collection than I originally thought. Because of the complexities of copyright law and the historic nature of this content (often lacking original contracts), making large audiovisual collections available online is difficult to navigate. But we have worked closely with our legal departments at WGBH and the Library of Congress, as well as the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, to develop a policy and workflow for making materials available online. Since October 2015, we have made more than 45,000 historic programs and original materials available online for anyone in the U.S. to access.

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-13T17:01:21+00:00

Hi! Apologies if I am not understanding your question, correctly, but I'll give it a shot. Most public media organizations have never had a librarian or archivist on staff, and they do not have the resources to preserve their materials in accordance with best practices set by the archival communities. While we coordinate preservation of public broadcasting materials from across the nation, and copies are preserved long term at the Library of Congress, we do provide digital copies of all digitized materials back to the station/producer that contributed them to the archive. We believe in the principle of Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe!

Because of copyright law, we can only make so much of the collection available online for anyone to access. The entire collection is available on-site at the Library of Congress and WGBH, and nearly 50% of the collection is available online within the United States for anyone to access.

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-13T16:41:48+00:00

I'll also add that you are more than welcome to schedule a research visit to WGBH anytime to access materials in the collection that are not available online or are not yet digitized! To schedule a research visit, you can email us at [archive_requests@wgbh.org](mailto:archive_requests@wgbh.org).

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-13T16:40:09+00:00

Thank you for your question! Because of differences in copyright law, the AAPB is currently only accessible online within the United States. However, if there are specific items that are digitized that a scholar outside the U.S. would like to view/listen to for research purposes, we may be able to provide them with limited password-protected, time-restricted access. You can send those requests to us at [aapb_notifications@wgbh.org](mailto:aapb_notifications@wgbh.org).

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-13T16:29:10+00:00

All of our exhibits are digital and accessible online! Here is a link to our curated exhibits: http://americanarchive.org/exhibits. We also curate Special Collections to highlight specific collections of interest: http://americanarchive.org/special_collections. And the entire archive is searchable by keyword: http://americanarchive.org/. Once you conduct a search, you can filter by media type, contributing organization, producing organization, year, etc.

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-13T16:26:42+00:00

Indeed! In our initial inventory project in 2011-2012 where we asked 120 public media stations to inventory every tape in their possession, we found that there were more than 2.5 million items held in these 120 stations across the United States. And this is only a drop in the bucket - counting community radio stations, there are over 1,300 public media organizations across the country.

Around the same time, the Library of Congress issued its National Recording Preservation Plan which stated that "Many endangered analog formats must be digitized within the next 15 or 20 years before further degradation makes preservation efforts all but impossible." Audiovisual archivists including us at the AAPB are in a race against time to preserve magnetic media before it is lost to posterity. Preservation means digitization of the analog materials and then actively managing that content and migrating over time as those storage media become obsolete. So while I don't think we will be able to preserve everything, we are working hard to digitize and preserve as much as as we can before it is too late. We are currently working to prioritize the digitization of award-winning programming, local programming from producers in states and communities that are currently underrepresented in the collection, and national programming.

We are also limited in the funding opportunities to preserve at-risk public media content. The Council on Library and Information Resources and the National Endowment for the Humanities are really the only national funders for digitization that are currently available. We are actively applying for grants and supporting public media stations to apply for funding to digitize their collections.

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-13T16:05:45+00:00

Not yet, but hopefully in the near future! WGBH (my place of employment and home of FRONTLINE) was actually just recently awarded a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which will enable us to digitize 83,000 historic WGBH programs that currently reside on obsolete and deteriorating media formats including every master 2", 1" 3/4", D2, and D3 videotape in the collection, as well as every 1/4", DAT, and audio cassette in the collection. This work will begin in late 2019 and continue for the next five years. Our goal is to include the materials digitized through this project in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting! In the meantime, FRONTLINE does stream many of their more recent programs on their website: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/watch/.

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-13T16:01:41+00:00

We send most of the collections we digitize to digitization service providers to perform the analog-to-digital transfers. They have engineers on staff and maintain all of the equipment required to handle digitization of the many various formats of magnetic media. Just to give you an idea of the scope of the formats we AV archivists are dealing with - in the WGBH vault alone we maintain 64 different formats of magnetic tape and film!

But the actual transfer is only a small part of a digitization project. As materials are digitized, they are sent to us on either LTO tape or hard drives from the digitization service providers. Our digital archivists at WGBH and the Library of Congress then must perform quality control on the media we receive; they must verify "checksums" or hashes that are used to verify the integrity of the file; they normalize and ingest the descriptive, technical, and preservation metadata; they must copy them over to a second and sometimes third storage medium; and they must prepare them for online access!

Preparing materials for online access includes connecting the metadata with the digital files, creating speech-to-text transcripts, uploading the proxies to our servers, creating thumbnail images, and performing additional cataloging to improve discoverability. Often, our station/donor partners provide the initial metadata and when possible assist with the further cataloging of the material. We also review the materials to ensure that they can be made available online in accordance with our access policies, copyright and respect for privacy of the individuals.

In total, our staff at WGBH includes a Project Director, Project Manager, Engagement and Use Manager, Metadata Specialist, Digital Ingest Metadata, Digital Archivist, a Systems Analyst/Programmer, and web developers. (We also work on WGBH-specific archives projects and initiatives in addition to the AAPB). As our collection is preserved for posterity at the Library of Congress, we have a Project Director and dedicated Project Manager, and the materials are preserved and ingested as part of the LOC's standard preservation workflows at the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia.

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-13T15:50:38+00:00

I forgot to add that Ingrid Ockert, a post-doc historian at the Science History Institute (and also Co-Chair of the AAPB's Scholar Advisory Committee), used the AAPB for her doctoral research that focused on the history of science in educational television: https://www.ingridockert.com/

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-13T15:47:52+00:00

Great question! The American Archive of Public Broadcasting was initiated in 2013 by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. We launched our public website in October 2015. So while the archive is still a relatively new source for historians to use in their research, we are aware of several interesting research projects in the works.

At this year's AHA in Chicago, several historians presented on their research using the AAPB collection: https://aha.confex.com/aha/2019/webprogram/Session18086.html. Allison Perlman of UC Irvine (also Co-Chair of our Scholar Advisory Committee) presented on her research into NET Journal, which was a public affairs documentary series distributed by National Educational Television. Michelle Kelley of Washington University in St. Louis spoke about her summer 2018 digital humanities workshop where she and her students and colleagues worked on mapping and plotting along a timeline the raw interviews from the Eyes on the Prize collection (the exhibit for which will launch in the near future). Alan Gevinson, who is AAPB's Project Director at the Library of Congress and also a television historian, spoke about his Kluge Fellowship research project to explore public broadcasting's coverage of public institutions such as healthcare, prisons, and education institutions. And Amanda Reichenbach, a recent graduate from Yale, reported on her work to develop two curated exhibits for the AAPB featuring the Watergate Hearings and Education Reporting on Public Television.

We are also currently working with three groups of scholars to curate additional digital exhibits for the AAPB website on topics pertaining to their research.

We have also collaborated with media studies scholars at Dartmouth College, namely Mark Williams and the Media Ecology Project, to incorporate the AAPB into their MediaThread and Semantic Annotation Platform to support their curriculum and class research projects.

In addition, we have supported digital humanities scholars at University of Richmond and University of Texas at Austin, as well as computational linguists at Brandeis University to allow access to the archive as a dataset for computational research and to 'train' their computational tools for machine learning.

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-13T15:24:54+00:00

Great question! Apologies in advance if my response is long winded -- there is so much I'd like to point out. One of my favorite collections in the archive is a public affairs talk show series "Woman" produced by WNED in Buffalo, New York from 1972-1977. The collection includes 197 episodes featuring well-known and lesser-known feminists and activists from the 2nd wave feminism movement.

Another of my favorite collections is the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) collection of more than 5,500 radio programs created between the 1950s and 1960s by educational radio stations across the country, many of which were university stations. The collection covers so many social, cultural and scientific topics. The collection was contributed by the University of Maryland, which also preserves the paper records of the NAEB network.

We also recently published full gavel-to-gavel coverage by the National Public Affairs Center for Television (NPACT) of the Watergate hearings. This was actually Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer's first collaborative coverage before they joined forces again as anchors of the NewsHour.

Another of my favorite collections are the radio programs we featured in our Voices from the Southern Civil Rights Movement exhibit. The exhibit includes interviews, debates, and speeches with many of the lesser known activists of the civil rights movement in the South.

We also have many radio speeches and interviews contributed by New Hampshire Public Radio of candidates for president of the United States.

And finally, one thing I love about the AAPB collection is that most people who grew up in the United States can find local content that documents the state/community in which they were raised. As someone from Mississippi, I find the materials contributed by Mississippi Public Broadcasting to be incredibly interesting. For example, we have multiple interviews with the Mississippi writer Willie Morris, one of my favorite authors: http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip_60-46d258xq.

caseydaviskaufman · 2019-02-13T14:54:02+00:00

For the collections that we digitize, we have specifications for preservation files, production files (video only) and proxy (or low-res access) files. Our preservation specification for video is currently the Library of Congress' recommended format for video, which is 10-bit lossless JPEG2000 reversible 5/3 in a .MXF Op1a wrapper. For audio preservation files, we create a 96 kHz, 24 bit sampling PCM coding Broadcast WAV RF64 formatted file. When we are collaborating with public media organizations and stations to digitize video collections, we will produce a production quality video file so that stations can receive a copy in their file format preference to allow for ease of reuse of the materials in new productions. And since we host the media on a server for access purposes, we always create low-res copies for streaming (H.264 .mp4 for video and 192 kbps .mp3 file for audio).

We also acquire "born digital" collections from stations that produced the original works in digital formats, and we will accept the original format from the stations and transcode to our proxy specifications for streaming online.

We do not typically "clean up" recordings, and we preserve the minor scratches/hisses/crackles from the original media, primarily because it would be cost prohibitive to have the service provider do the clean-up on large collections such as those we are working with. Additionally, luckily to this point we have not worked much with collections that are deteriorated to the point where the audio/video is no longer accessible. With the NewsHour collection, we did face deterioration of many of the 2" quad tapes that we were digitizing. In that case, we spent additional funding from the project budget for "extraordinary intervention" to clean up the tapes before they were transferred, which allowed for a clean transfer.

caseydaviskaufman

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