WGBH Educational Foundation on behalf of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) is pleased to announce the start of development on a new management system for the AAPB, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The AAPB, a collaboration between Boston public broadcaster WGBH and the Library of Congress, has been working to digitize and preserve more than 50,000 hours of broadcasts and previously inaccessible programs from public radio and public television’s more than 70-year legacy. The new system, built in compliance with the PBCore metadata schema, will improve the AAPB’s ability to acquire additional collections and manage the metadata for the 2.5 million records in the AAPB’s collection. The system will also provide participating public broadcasting stations and archives across the country a platform to search, manage, and access their own collections.


WGBH is teaming up with AVP and Indiana University Libraries to configure Avalon, an evolving and robust media delivery system created within the Samvera community, to the needs of the AAPB. The Samvera community is a group of over 35 institutions working together to develop shared technical solutions for the management of digital content. To provide the most benefit to both the AAPB and the Samvera community, the team is using a strategy of building multiple components or modules that can be plugged into Hyrax, an application adopted widely by Samvera partners, like Avalon. Among the features the team plans to develop are reporting functionality and support for PBCore ingest, export, and data modeling.  In the spirit of open source development, the Archival Management System (AMS) is being developed in tandem with the next iteration of Avalon. As both projects progress, the AMS team will work in close collaboration and consultation with Avalon team members, comprised of Indiana University and Northwestern University staff. WGBH, Indiana University, and Northwestern University are partners in the Samvera community.


About WGBH

WGBH Boston is America’s preeminent public broadcaster and the largest producer of PBS content for TV and the Web, including Masterpiece, Antiques Roadshow, Frontline, Nova, American Experience, Arthur, and more than a dozen other prime-time, lifestyle, and children’s series. WGBH also is a leader in educational multimedia, including PBS LearningMedia, and a pioneer in technologies and services that make media accessible to the 36 million Americans who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind, or visually impaired. WGBH has been recognized with hundreds of honors: Emmys, Peabodys, duPont-Columbia Awards…even two Oscars. Find more information at www.wgbh.org<http://www.wgbh.org/>.


About the American Archive of Public Broadcasting

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) is a collaboration between the Library of Congress and the WGBH Educational Foundation to coordinate a national effort to preserve at-risk public media before its content is lost to posterity and provide a central web portal for access to the unique programming that public stations have aired over the past 70 years. To date, over 50,000 hours of television and radio programming contributed by more than 100 public media organizations and archives across the United States have been digitized for long-term preservation and access. The entire collection is available on location at WGBH and the Library of Congress, and almost 25,000 programs are available online at americanarchive.org<http://americanarchive.org/>.


About AVP

Founded in 2006, AVP is a global consulting and software development firm focused on freeing organizations from the obstacles of information management and maximizing the usability of their data. AVP focuses on leveraging a deep understanding of technology, information, business, and people to advance the ways in which data is used for the benefit of individuals, organizations, and causes. Visit AVP at https://www.weareavp.com

<https://www.weareavp.com>

About Indiana University Libraries

Bloomington, Indiana is home to Indiana University Libraries, one of the nation’s largest public academic research libraries. Our collections, people, and spaces use knowledge to inspire great work.  IU Libraries partners with every academic department on campus. Materials are digital, visual, audio and print. Over 60,000 journals are offered electronically, and the libraries hold 9.9 million print volumes in 450 languages, and 100,000 films in its Moving Image Archive. A long-time leader in digital library projects and open source software development, IU Libraries developed wide-ranging digital initiatives as early as the 1990’s and recently embarked on the ambitious university-wide Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative.


About The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Founded in 1969, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation endeavors to strengthen, promote, and, where necessary, defend the contributions of the humanities and the arts to human flourishing and to the well-being of diverse and democratic societies by supporting exemplary institutions of higher education and culture as they renew and provide access to an invaluable heritage of ambitious, path-breaking work. Additional information is available at mellon.org.<http://www.mellon.org/>