WGBH Awarded National Endowment for the Humanities Grant to Support Public Media Content Management Tools and Training

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

WGBH Awarded National Endowment for the Humanities Grant to Support Public Media Content Management Tools and Training

$345,000 will support training materials for PBCore metadata management

Boston, Mass. (December 14, 2016) – WGBH Educational Foundation is pleased to announce that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded WGBH a $345,000 Preservation and Access Research and Development grant to pursue the PBCore Development and Training Project. Short for “Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary,” PBCore is a metadata schema – a standard for organizing information – for the management of public media collections in the United States.

WGBH will use the grant funds to develop tools, methodologies and training workshops to make the standard more accessible to archivists and public media organizations over the course of this 27-month project. Deliverables for the project will include a PBCore cataloging tool, updates to the website, webinars and other training materials, sample records and more.

WGBH’s Media Library and Archives (MLA) has been responsible for the ongoing development of PBCore since 2013, when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) selected WGBH and the Library of Congress as the permanent stewards of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB). The AAPB coordinates a national effort to preserve at-risk public media before its content is lost to posterity and manages digital access to the unique programming that public stations have aired over the past 60 years. Using PBCore to describe public media content enables anyone managing media content to easily organize and share what is being created today. WGBH is honored that the NEH, which awards grants to top-rated proposals for the preservation of America’s rich history and cultural heritage, has chosen to support this work.

The $345,000 grant award will fund a number of initiatives designed to enhance PBCore’s accessibility among archivists, public media organizations, and archival educators. Deliverables for the project will include:

• a new widely available open-source PBCore cataloging tool
• improvements and updates to existing PBCore tools
• metadata crosswalks and sample integrations with a number of commonly-used metadata standards
• updated PBCore-based Excel templates, sample records, and use cases that expand upon existing guidelines and put them in plain language for non-archivists
• updates to the PBCore website that incorporate the new tools and documentation in an accessible and user-friendly manner
• a set of free webinars explaining the use of the new tools
• a printable PDF manual collecting all PBCore documentation and cataloging guidelines
• PBCore user training workshops held at major conferences
• two fully-funded PBCore train-the-trainer workshops which will fund public media professionals and archival educators to learn about training others in PBCore

WGBH looks forward to working with the PBCore user communities to lower barriers around the description and preservation of public media materials.

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About WGBH
WGBH Boston is America’s preeminent public broadcaster and the largest producer of PBS content for TV and the Web, including Masterpiece, Antiques Roadshow, Frontline, Nova, American Experience, Arthur, Curious George, and more than a dozen other prime-time, lifestyle, and children’s series. WGBH also is a leader in educational multimedia, including PBS LearningMedia, and a pioneer in technologies and services that make media accessible to the 36 million Americans who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind, or visually impaired. WGBH has been recognized with hundreds of honors: Emmys, Peabodys, duPont-Columbia Awards…even two Oscars. Find more information at www.wgbh.org.

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 60 years. To date, over 40,000 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 16,000 programs are available online at americanarchive.org.

About the National Endowment for the Humanities
Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.