This post was written by Casey E. Davis, AAPB Project Manager at WGBH, for WGBH’s Public Broadcasting Preservation Scholarship crowdfunding campaign.
In April and May of 2016, WGBH on behalf of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) led a crowdfunding campaign to fund the Public Broadcasting Preservation Scholarship.
The Public Broadcasting Preservation Scholarship will provide funding support for public media representatives from AAPB National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR) host institutions to participate in a week-long training event focused on digital preservation of public media.
The training event is taking place as part of the AAPB NDSR project, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The AAPB NDSR is creating seven post-master’s degree residencies at public media organizations across the country, focusing on audiovisual digital preservation of public television and radio. The residencies will begin in July 2016 with a week-long immersion week in Boston, taught by leading experts in the field of audiovisual preservation. The Scholarship will fund the host mentors to travel and participate in immersion week.
The Scholarship will help host mentors gain and sharpen the skills that are needed to sustain digital preservation activities at beyond the term of the 10-month residency. This knowledge will improve their ability to preserve their at-risk materials for many years to come. We had 26 contributions to the Scholarship, which raised a total of $2,510. Our sincere thanks goes out to all that made a contribution.
Two of our contributors deserve special recognition and appreciation for their financial support, including Crawford Media Services, our Bronze Ambassador, and John Ptak, a member of the AAPB’s Executive Advisory Council. We are extremely grateful for their many contributions to the Scholarship and to the AAPB in general.
Crawford Media Services, Inc. — Bronze Ambassador
www.crawford.com
A leading provider of digitization, archival storage, asset management and meta-tagging, Crawford’s mission is to help clients clear the hurdle of digital preservation. Built on many successful projects, Crawford offers experience, expertise, and resources to resolve the complexity and uncertainty of digital migration and file based workflows.
In 2011, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting selected Crawford Media Services to provide digitization services for the American Archive Project. A substantial undertaking, the task as outlined was to digitize 35,000 hours of audio and video content across 55,000 tapes, and transcode another 5,000 hours of born digital content from approximately 100 stations from across the nation. The massive digital migration project has enabled the American Archive of Public Broadcasting to grow into one of the most educational and culturally diverse archives in the country. Crawford is proud to have provided the workforce and technology to realize this ambitious project for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
John Ptak
A graduate of UCLA ’67, John Ptak worked as a Hollywood talent agent for 35 years, first at ICM and thereafter at William Morris and CAA, with an emphasis on directors and producers. At CAA, he expanded the role of the talent agent by also representing the financing and distribution arrangements of over 100 independent films. He was a key executive in CAA’s corporate consultancy arrangements on such accounts as Coca-Cola, IMAX, and the French bank, Credit Lyonnais, with whom he participated in the restructuring of MGM and the rebirth of United Artists. He left CAA in 2006 to form Arsenal, which provides advisory services to film production companies and financiers. He was recently an Executive Producer of Peter Weir’s THE WAY BACK, Matt Reeves’ LET ME IN and Terry Gilliam’s DR. PARNASSUS.
Ptak is a member of The National Film Preservation Board, the American Archive of Public Broadcasting Advisory Council, The National Film Preservation Foundation, and, the Foundation Committee of The Motion Picture & Television Fund, where he played a key role in its alliance with the UCLA Health System. He’s also served on advisory boards and panels for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, The National Endowment for the Arts, UCLA, Loyola Marymount University and Chapman University.
blog.americanarchive.org 