Hi everyone, I am Ashley Bell, a graduate student with the University of Alabama’s School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS). I am a participant in the 2022 group of EBSCO Fellows at SLIS, in collaboration with WGBH in Boston, the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) and the Library of Congress. Over the course of the Fall 2022 semester and Spring 2023 semester I worked at my local PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) WSRE in Pensacola, Florida. WSRE is Northwest Florida’s Public Broadcasting Service member station licensed to the Pensacola State College District Board of Trustees and supported by WSRE-TV Foundation, Inc.
Established in 1967, WSRE broadcasts four free over-the-air channels serving 1.5 million people along the Gulf Coast from the Alabama/Mississippi state line to Destin. My responsibilities were to inventory and prepare and digitize locally produced programming (The AWARE! Show) for public use at WSRE and within the AAPB. Here is my experience as part of EBSCO and my time at WSRE.
I attended a two-day training session at the University of Alabama where I was given basic training on the equipment that I would be using. Representatives of WGBH and EBSCO teachers at UA were on hand for assistance. There was a lot jammed packed into the two-day training session and it honestly could have been extended into a week. It was information overload.
The start of my time at WSRE was not the best. The BetacamSP deck that was at the station had stopped working before I arrived and I needed to wait for UA to track down and send a new deck. The equipment that was shipped from UA arrived damaged and I was missing some items. The laptop I was designated was left behind by the previous fellow and had not been updated in months and was missing software. I was able to update my school issued laptop while I waited on my equipment. Almost two months into the fall semester I was finally able to start digitizing once my deck arrived.
I immediately got to work conducting an inventory, cataloging, and time-stamping the AWARE show tapes. AWARE! explores the varied cultural interests of the many ethnic communities throughout Northwest Florida and parts of Alabama. Focusing on people and current issues, the series features newsmakers, role models and celebrities who relate their encouraging, inspirational, and sometimes controversial but always entertaining stories. These were hour long tapes. Episodes show a range of topics from “Homelessness & Poverty” “Financial Empowerment,” to “Our Voices are Many”.
I was able to digitize my tapes my placing them into a deck that was hooked up to a Blackmagic device that converts audio and video signals into a digital signal, which then goes to my laptop converted into a digital file. It would take one hour to digitize the tapes as that is how long the recordings were. By the end of my internship, I was able to digitize around 60 tapes. The digitized tapes and all my files were sent to WGBH and WSRE to be made publicly available.
The start of my internship was not ideal; I was very frustrated and ready to quit. However, with many one-on-one Zoom calls with one of my professors, I feel I was able to successfully complete my internship up to my standards. I know I will be able to take the skills I learned and use them in my future career.
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