Hello!
We are staff of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB), a collaboration between the Library of Congress and Boston public broadcaster WGBH. The AAPB coordinates a national effort to preserve at-risk public media before its content is lost to posterity and provides a centralized web portal for access to the unique programming aired by public stations over the past 70+ years. To date, we have digitized nearly 100,000 historic public television and radio programs and original materials (such as raw interviews). The entire collection is accessible for research on location at the Library of Congress and WGBH, and more than 45,000 programs are available for listening and viewing online, within the United States, at http://americanarchive.org.
Among the collections preserved are more than 13,500 episodes of the PBS NewsHour Collection, dating back to 1975; more than 1,300 programs and documentaries from National Educational Television, the predecessor to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS); raw, unedited interviews from the landmark documentary Eyes on the Prize; raw, unedited interviews with eyewitnesses and historians recorded for American Experience documentaries including Stonewall Uprising, The Murder of Emmett Till, Freedom Riders, 1964, The Abolitionists and many others. We aim to grow the archive by up to 25,000 hours of additional digitized content per year. The AAPB also works with scholars to publish curated exhibits and essays that provide historical and cultural context to the Archive’s content. We have also worked with researchers who are interested in using the collection (metadata, transcripts, and media) as a dataset for digital humanities and other computational scholarship.
The collection, acquired from more than 100 stations and producers across the U.S., not only provides national news, public affairs, and cultural programming from the past 70 years, but local programming as well. Researchers using the collection have the potential to uncover events, issues, institutional shifts, and social movements on the local scene that have not yet made it into the larger historical narrative. Because of the geographical breadth of the collection, scholars can use it to help uncover ways that national and even global processes played out on the local scene. The long chronological reach from the late 1940s to the present will supply historians with previously inaccessible primary source material to document change (or stasis) over time.
The staff who answered questions were:
Karen Cariani, Executive Director of the WGBH Media Library and Archives and WGBH Project Director for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting
Casey Davis Kaufman, Associate Director of the WGBH Media Library and Archives and Project Manager for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting
Ryn Marchese, Engagement and Use Manager for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting at WGBH
From 12pm – 4pm Eastern on February 13, 2019, historians asked us about how we collect, preserve and provide access to the collection, as well as questions about the content of the archive, and of course how scholars might collaborate with us to use the archive for research or in their teaching (we love hearing ideas!)
Connect with us!
Sign up for our newsletter: http://americanarchive.org/about-the-american-archive/newsletter
Check out our blog: https://americanarchivepb.wordpress.com/
And follow the AAPB on social media!
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/amarchivepub
Twitter: https://twitter.com/amarchivepub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amarchivepub/
And if you are seeing this at a later date, please feel free to reach out to us directly at aapb_notifications@wgbh.org!
What are the chances of seeing Sesame Street hosted here for posterity?
This is a sensitive question and I understand if you're not able to answer it, but:
What are the implications of the Trump administration's funding priorities for your work? It's no secret that the Trump admin supports funding cuts to major humanities initiatives, including the scrapping of the NEH and NEA. Is the financial future of the AAPB at risk under the current government?
Is there anything from your collection that you'd like to specifically highlight? Perhaps something that doesn't get as much attention or something that is a personal favorite?
When you conserve or digitize the recordings, are you using high-fidelity formats? Do you clean up any of the recordings, or preserve the scratches/hiss/crackle and all?
What are some of the more interesting projects that the archives are being used for?
Hi! How do you determine "at-risk," public media? What are the characteristics you look for, and is there a sliding scale (of sorts) used to determine their risk level?
Thank you so much for answering questions!
How intensive is the digitisation process for various forms of older media? In my ignorance I have no idea how we store, say, newsreels from the 50s or radio broadcasts from the 70s. When you're dealing with thousands of hours of content it must be an enormous undertaking to catalogue and digitise it! How many archivists work at the business end of processing and cataloguing content?
Does this archive include episodes of FRONTLINE ?
What a massive undertaking! How long has it been underway so far and, hopefully, how long will it take before everything is completed?
Hey, I'm a researcher at Stanford that's working with the Internet Archive on analysis of cable TV news video. We have an ongoing project to apply computer vision techniques to automatically analyze 200,000 hours of CNN/FOX/MSNBC. Our goal is to quantify screen time and coverage for individuals, stories, topics, and so on across the last decade.
In the process we've developed an open source toolkit to make this kind of large-scale video analysis more feasible. If that sounds like something y'all would be interested in, happy to talk more! wcrichto@cs.stanford.edu
Nice! I don't go a day without checking what's on PBS. It has enriched my life immeasurably.
Good afternoon! I was actually just thinking about how important it is to preserve the almost 50 year history of the Austin City Limits television show for future (and current) generations to enjoy. Are there plans to incorporate this since it is broadcasted on PBS or are there licensing issues involved?
Additionally, what is the expertise of those involved with the American Archives and how did this opportunity present itself? It seems like an awesome and enriching experience.
Thank you for your work!
Where's the .torrent link?
Sorry if that's out-of-pace with the curated-walled-garden approach, but it seems to me that a "centralized" approach is fundamentally at odds with truly long-term preservation. If this material is so important, why's it held under restrictive copyright terms? What can be done about that?
Would it be possible to make the collection accessible from outside the US? Would love it! Thanks for your time from 🇪🇺!
This is amazing! Thank you all for the hard work! I’m sure it has been a grueling process. I can’t believe this is the first I’ve heard of this.
What are the chances that Columbus and the Age of Discovery will ever be made available? I've been looking for a copy of this documentary series for close to two decades now. I'd be willing to BUY a copy if I could find it for sale anywhere.
As you have gone through this process, have you found anything that really surprised you?
Hi there! Thanks for the work you're doing. Any plans for a Roku app or similar in-home friendly way of viewing the archive?
Hi, I moderate the old time radio show subreddit r/OTR. While we often branch into historical, news, sports, and public talk of the times, we primarily focus on entertainment of the '20s - '70s. (Mostly the '40s and '50s).
While many of these shows have been re-recorded often enough to escape the dangers of being lost, there's been issues of private companies attempting to make copywrite or other ownership claims on material long past the age of entering the public domain.
Are these claims by networks and private companies valid and can they legally interfere with the sharing of recordings?
As a private citizen I want to thank all of you involved in this project. I think it’s imperative we preserve as much history in as many formats as possible. Many people do not understand that our history directly influences our future. Again, thank you one and all.
I've been watching "Dancing Disco 101" for about 20 minutes longer than I should have. This particular show is from 1979 and it's probably the most well produced "how to dance" video I've ever seen. Amazing the stuff that's in this archive.
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 with any further questions or ideas!
Will NOVA be archived, and if so, how many episodes? I know many were co-productions with the BBC, Granada TV, and the CBC, but it would be a shame to have them lost to history. In particular, I'm really hoping that the NOVA program 'The Case of the Midwife Toad' is still out there.
This project makes me very happy
How far back does the collection go and how were programs, say from the 50s and 60s, saved? Was there any sort of tape elimination, or wiping, that occurred? I'm thinking of how in the 1970s the BBC wiped the tapes of many programs, such as Doctor Who, because they didn't see any more value to storing them.
Can any of these recordings legally be sampled for music production?
Is the media contained in the Archive all copyrighted or are they part of the public domain?
In the last five minutes, share with us what you discovered about the AAPB today!
This is awesome, listening to Rick Steves now.
I began reading this and thought, "I'll finally get to see Eyes on the Prize again, then you mentioned it. Lol. I'm so excited. I loved that program. My mother and I were sitting waiting for it to come on every week. I tried like hell to find it when I was homeschooling my daughter. Thank you for doing this. That's awesome!
About ten years ago, I went on a quest to try to find many of the episodes from the first few seasons of the series Nature, from the early/mid 1980s. At some point later in its history the series took a dramatic turn for the worse, but the early seasons were amazing and I wanted to watch them again. I spent a lot of time on phone calls to PBS and various stations and the best information I could get was that apart from a few episodes sold to Time Life Video, most of the originals had probably been destroyed. If true, that would be very very sad.
Your project gives me some hope that maybe someone found these... unfortunately, it seems nearly impossible to search your archive for series. Obviously the keyword "nature" turns up hundreds of other things, even when I limit it by year.
Do you have any idea of the early seasons of this show survived? Do you know if you have the tapes?
I am surprised there really isn't a lot from South Florida PBS. I know WPBT has great partnerships with the Wolfson Archives in Miami. Are there plans to take on digitization of programs from them as well as WXEL in West Palm Beach?