American Archive of Public Broadcasting

In June 2017, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded GBH a grant to support the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. GBH is using these grant funds to build technical capacity for the intake of new content, develop collaborative initiatives, build training and support services for AAPB contributors, and foster scholarly use and enhanced public access for the collection. Over the course of the project, AAPB’s activities include:

  • Collaborating with AVPreserve and Indiana University to develop new core and custom features of the Avalon Media System (developed by the libraries of Indiana University and Northwestern University) to replace AAPB’s current Archival Management System (AMS)
  • Developing educational and training webinars on a variety of preservation topics for participating organizations
  • Creating a Station Advisory Committee, Educator Advisory Committee, and Scholar Advisory Committee
  • Supporting the fundraising efforts and grant proposals for digitizing public broadcasting collections
  • Collaborating with donors and the Library of Congress to grow the collection by up to 50,000 hours of digitized or born digital content
  • Ingesting metadata records with links to public broadcasting content already available online through other repositories
  • Adding thousands of hours to the Online Reading Room -Curating new digital exhibitions and special collections
  • Enhancing AAPB’s social media presence
  • Evaluating the viability and value of adding another AAPB institutional partner