The Library of Congress partnered with Boston's GBH to conserve a collection of audio and video from radio and television stations around the country. GBH is the co-curator of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.
The process of collecting the material for archival begin in 1967 with the passing of the Public Broadcasting Act which tasked the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with creating an archive to save radio and television taped programs which were rapidly deteriorating. However, the technology for digitizing the material would not be available until 2010.
Engagement and Use Manager, Ryn Marchese, of GBH describes the urgency of the project. "We are at a race against time to preserve public media," she says in the introduction to the project.
Evidently, tapes of critically important footage of everything from interviews with president John F. Kennedy, as well as Rosa Parks to valuable programs about the space program, Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and American music were on the verge of corroding into a state that would render them unusable for future generations.
At the Library of Congress, Alan Gevinson, the project co-director said the mission was "to coordinate a national effort to digitally preserve significant public radio and public television programs from the past 70 years for present and future generations to enjoy before the original material degrades and is lost forever." So, now GBH provides a centralized web portal for streaming access to more than 50,000 items.
This was all made possible after the funding became available. 2.5 million records were collected from 120 stations nationwide. These records have programs that contain in-depth studies of the American experience. There are interviews, as mentioned above, with Eleanor Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy that show the beginnings of the movement to grant women the right to vote. There are videos of Vietnam-era conflict on both sides of the world.
These records have been digitized and are available at what the team in Boston calls the "online reading room." Researchers, teachers, and others interested in viewing the material can do so for free by accessing Americanarchive.org and searching the catalog.
"The Library of Congress and GBH were awarded co-stewardship of the initiative. The Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation at Culpeper, Virginia serves as the preservation arm of the AAPB where the collection is preserved for posterity," Marchese said on the introduction presentation available online at the Library of Congress's website.
The web portal is easy to use and has useful features. The home page contains a carousel of content that is relevant for recent events. For example, at the time of the writing of this article Earth Day was taking place in the United States. On the carousel of video from the NET, there was an animated film about air pollution.
The collections available on the portal are organized by subject to make it easier for researchers to find material relevant to their inquiries. Their records are numerous so assembling them into collections is a great aid. Collections include: Riverside Radio Collection, Feminist Community Radio at KOPN, The Murder of Emmett Till Interviews, Jewish American Heritage Collection, Vietnam: a Television History Interviews Collection, Peabody Awards Collection, the Ken Burns' Civil War Interviews, as well as many others.
"These collections offer retrospective programs that add context and historical perspective to the passage of time. It's an amazing resource for studying our 20th and 21st-century history," stated Marchese.
The project's co-director mentioned how pleased she was with the service that she helped provide. "GBH has one of the oldest and most robust public media archives in the country. It's a tremendous honor and privilege to work with the Library of Congress to help preserve programs from stations across the country and to share our knowledge of best practices," said Karen Cariani, the David O. Ives Executive Director of GBH Archives and AAPB Project Co-Director.
"The growth we’ve seen in visitors to the site, as well the range of programs people share proves the value in restoring and reviving public media’s legacy of groundbreaking television and radio and the trust that our station partners place with us when they share their content with the AAPB."