BOSTON (August 30, 2018) –The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) has announced three new advisory committees: The Education Advisory Committee (EduAC), the Scholar Advisory Committee (SAC) and the Stations and Producers Advisory Committee (SPAC). These three groups of public media advocates and experts in their fields will grow the AAPB’s reach and engagement and will provide feedback on how to improve the AAPB’s operations as relates to each group’s unique needs. This initiative is made possible with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The AAPB, a collaboration between Boston public media station 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. A list of Committee members is available at http://americanarchive.org/about-the-american-archive/advisory-committees.
“The AAPB is a vast resource and a unique catalogue of our nation’s history through the lens of public media and local perspectives. The feedback we receive from our new committees is crucial to making the AAPB as accessible and user-friendly as possible to key communities across the country,” said Karen Cariani, David O. Ives Executive Director of the WGBH Media Library and Archives and WGBH’s Project Director for the AAPB. “We look forward to collaborating with scholars, educators, stations and producers and expanding the reach of the AAPB.”
The SAC, comprised of scholars from universities, academic and cultural institutions and non-profits from across the U.S., will collaborate on developing ways to engage with scholars and students, discuss how the AAPB can better support research, provide feedback on the AAPB’s website usability and accessibility, advise on future collections significant for preservation and assist in outreach across their academic networks. SAC scholars represent expertise in a range of fields, including public history, media, cinema, library and information science, journalism, science and American studies. The AAPB’s audio and video content from public media stations is a rich resource for research across these topics and more. The SAC’s input will help the AAPB make the use of these resources more accessible for researchers.
A group of education professionals comprise the EduAC. This committee will help the AAPB assess how it can better grow the usage of public media materials in k-12 and community college classrooms. EduAC will advise the AAPB on how to build better and/or integrate with existing online educational tools, to engage with k-12 students and better support educators in the field, and will act as advocates for public media preservation in their networks and communities.
The SPAC will bring together members of the public media community to gather input on how the AAPB can help stations preserve public media and make their historic content more accessible. The SPAC will offer feedback on the archiving services most needed by public media stations and identify significant collections and content for preservation.
The AAPB is a national effort to preserve at-risk public media and provide a central web portal for access to the programming that public stations and producers have created 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, and the Archive aims to grow by up to 25,000 additional hours per year. The entire collection is available for research on location at WGBH and the Library, and currently more than 30,000 programs are available in the AAPB’s Online Reading Room at americanarchive.org to anyone in the United States.
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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 more than 30,000 programs are available online at
americanarchive.org.
About WGBH
WGBH Boston is America’s preeminent public broadcaster and the largest producer of PBS content for TV and the Web, including Frontline, Nova, American Experience, Masterpiece, Antiques Roadshow, Arthur, and more than a dozen other prime-time, lifestyle, and children’s series. WGBH also is a major supplier of programming for public radio and a partner with Public Radio International (PRI). As a leader in educational multimedia for the classroom, WGBH supplies content to PBS LearningMedia, a national broadband service for teachers and students. WGBH also is a pioneer in technologies and services that make media accessible to those with hearing or visual impairments. WGBH has been recognized with hundreds of honors: Emmys, Peabodys, duPont-Columbia Awards and Oscars. Find more information at www.wgbh.org.
About the Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library, offering access to the creative record of the United States - and extensive materials from around the world - both on site and online. It is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office. Explore collections, reference services and other programs and plan a visit at loc.gov, access the official site for U.S. federal legislative information at congress.gov and register creative works of authorship at copyright.gov.
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.
