The American Archive of Public Broadcasting is pleased to announce our new (interim) discovery portal to access inventory records.
These records were created during the CPB-funded and WGBH-managed American Archive Content Inventory Project (AACIP), an inventory effort to gather item-level PBCore data from legacy at-risk audiovisual assets obtained from public media stations across the nation: from KEXP in Seattle to Unalaska Community Broadcasting to Ozarks Public Broadcasting. Public media stations then selected video and audio from their own collections for digitization, many local programs never seen before except by immediate geographic communities.
While the American Archive of Public Broadcasting wraps up the digitization of these 40,000 hours of selected content, begins cataloging the digitized material and developing our digital archive website, we’re excited to offer access to the almost 2.5 million records collected as part of the AACIP, now available through the Interim Access Portal.
Almost all of these records were created before stations or archivists had the capability of playing back the content stored on increasingly obsolete video and audio formats. The now-in-progress digitization of 40,000 hours of this content will allow catalogers to view and fully describe the content. So if you don’t find what you’re looking for now, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. This data might be irregular at the moment, but we’re excited to expose it to the public for faceted browsing, and let you track our progress as we go forward in improving our records and exposing content. In the spring, further work will have been completed and normalized data will be exposed to the public via our online digital archive, currently in the works.
Please don’t hesitate to contact the project team with any questions and research requests.
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