American Archive Announces New Home

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting — an unprecedented collection of 40,000 hours of content produced across the nation on public television and public radio — has announced its new home under a collaboration between The Library of Congress and WGBH in Boston. After a multi-year process that began with an inventory of over 120 Public Broadcasting stations and is now in the midst of digitizing select materials from those stations, the management of the Archive and its eventual public access component is transferring from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to LOC and WGBH.

AVPreserve is proud to have participated in various aspects of the American Archive’s development from early on, including assistance in strategic planning, revision of the PBCore metadata schema in use by the Archive, and conducting station inventories in Rochester, NY and Trenton, NJ. Over the past year we have developed the AMS content management system which has been used to centralize all inventory records, manage the digitization workflow between individual stations and Crawford Media Services, and provide online access to digitized content for the stations. We will continue to maintain this system and assist in the transfer of data and content to the new home.

This has been a massive, exciting project with no real model to follow for achieving something so large and complex. All the people who have been involved along the way helped overcome significant challenges. It was inspiring to work with them, and is very satisfying to see the American Archive come to this point where such amazing content will be made available to the public again.