In 2015, the Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded a generous grant to WGBH on behalf of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) to develop the AAPB National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR). Through this project, we have placed seven graduates of master’s degree programs in digital stewardship residencies at public media organizations around the country.
AAPB NDSR has already yielded dozens of great resources for the public media and audiovisual preservation community – and the residents aren’t even halfway done yet! As we near the program’s midpoint, we wanted to catch you up on the program so far.
We started off in July 2016 with Immersion Week in Boston, which featured presentations on the history of public media and the AAPB, an overview of physical and digital audiovisual materials, an introduction to audiovisual metadata, and instructional seminars on digital preservation workflows, project management, and professional development. Attendees also participated in a full-day session on “Thinking Like a Computer” and a hands-on command line workshop.
Several sessions from Immersion Week were filmed by
WGBH Forum Network, including:
- Why Archive Public Media
- The History of Public Media and the AAPB
- Mastering Project Management
- Growing Your Professional Profile
- Negotiating at Work
- Think Like a Computer
- Get To Know Your Audiovisual Media
In August 2016, the residents dispersed to their host stations, and began recording their experiences in a series of thoughtful blog posts, covering topics from home movies to DAM systems to writing in Python.
AAPB NDSR blog posts to date include:
“Digital Stewardship at KBOO Community Radio,” Selena Chau (8/9/16)
“Metadata Practices at Minnesota Public Radio,” Kate McManus (8/15/16)
“NDSA, data wrangling, and KBOO treasures,” Selena Chau (8/30/16)
“Minnesota Books and Authors,” Kate McManus (9/23/16)
“Snapshot from the IASA Conference: Thoughts on the 2nd Day,” Eddy Colloton (9/29/16)
“Who just md5deep-ed and redirected all them checksums to a .csv file? This gal,” Lorena Ramirez-Lopez (10/6/16)
“IASA Day 1 and Voice to Text Recognition,” Selena Chau (10/11/16)
“IASA – Remixed,” Kate McManus (10/12/16)
“Learning GitHub (or, if I can do it, you can too!)” Andrew Weaver (10/13/16)
“Home Movie Day,” Eddy Colloton (10/15/16)
“Snakes in the Archive,” Adam Lott (10/20/16)
“Vietnam, Oral Histories, and the WYSO Archives Digital Humanities Symposium,” Tressa Graves (11/7/16)
“Archives in Conversation (A Glimpse into the Minnesota Archives Symposium, 2016),” Kate McManus (11/15/16)
“Inside the WHUT video library clean-up – part 1: SpaceSaver,” Lorena Ramirez-Lopez (11/21/16)
“Is there something that does it all?: Choosing a metadata management system,” Selena Chau (11/22/16)
“Inside the WHUT video library clean-up – part 2: lots of manual labor,” Lorena Ramirez-Lopez (12/20/16)
“Just Ask For Help Already!” Eddy Colloton (12/22/16)
August also kicked off our first series of guest webinars, focusing on a range of topics of interest to audiovisual and digital preservation professionals. Most webinars were recorded, and all have slides available.
AAPB NDSR webinars to date include:
“Metadata: Storage, Modeling and Quality,” by Kara Van Malssen, Partner & Senior Consultant at AVPreserve
“Public Media Production Workflows,” by Leah Weisse, WGBH Digital Archive Manager/Production Archival Compliance Manager (slides)
“Imposter Syndrome” by Jen LaBarbera, Head Archivist at Lambda Archives of San Diego, and Dinah Handel, Mass Digitization Coordinator at the NYPL (slides)
“Preservation and Access: Digital Audio,” by Erica Titkemeyer, Project Director and AV Conservator at the Southern Folklife Collection (slides)
“Troubleshooting Digital Preservation,” by Shira Peltzman, Digital Archivist at UCLA Library (slides)
“Studs Terkel Radio Archive: Tips and Tricks for Sharing Great Audio,” by Grace Radkins, Digital Content Librarian at Studs Terkel Radio Library (slides)
“From Theory to Action: Digital Preservation Tools and Strategies,” by Danielle Spalenka, Project Director of the Digital POWRR Project (slides)
Our first two resident-hosted webinars (open to the public) will be happening this month! Registration and more info is available here.
The residents also hosted two great panel presentations, first in September at the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives Conference, and in November at the Association of Moving Image Archivists Conference. The AMIA session in particular generated a lot of Twitter chatter; you can see a roundup here.
To keep up with AAPB NDSR blog posts, webinar recordings, and project updates as they happen, follow the AAPB NDSR site at ndsr.americanarchive.org.
blog.americanarchive.org 