The following was submitted by AV Cataloging and Metadata Intern, Kaycee Conover.
During the cool evenings of the 2026 spring, I feel the sun set over Boston as I look at frames from a 1970s Newark soundstage, the Seton Hall basketball court, or the streets of Trenton.
As an AV Cataloging and Metadata Intern at GBH working with the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, my fellow intern and I have been spending our time with New Jersey Nightly News in an effort to identify all of the individuals who contributed their perspectives to the program — the New Jersey Network’s anchors and reporters, but also the interviewees sharing their experiences and thoughts about the goings-on in their communities.
We have been able to do much of this work because of a partnership with Brandeis University’s CLAMS project and their development of open-source AI tools for cultural heritage institutions.1 A combination of VLM and LLM tools parse through the thousands of hours of programming, identify scenes with text, and extract on-screen text that identifies the program’s contributors. Then, we scrutinise the database of these scenes and transcriptions to confirm their accuracy. I do still fear the possibility of AI generating information in our lives that is used to explain, understand, and define our world, especially when the information concerns individuals whose faces and voices are captured from over forty years ago. But here I am, decades away from the broadcast, able to engage with hundreds instead of handfuls of programs every day because technology helps me find frames that present written names.
My time, instead, is spent with the people in the programs. With my fellow intern, Emily Hankins, and our supervisor, Owen King, I’m a part of conversations about why the work that we do is important. There are the principles of the field, which emphasise the importance of creating access to diverse historical voices to provide entry into a more equitable historical memory.2 By identifying contributors in local level public broadcasting, we are challenging the concept of notability. We are acknowledging the significance of a person, an event, a feeling, regardless of how far its resonance extends. This is the work of local public broadcasting — information, inspiration, and entertainment collected and represented by the community for the community. New Jersey Network contains topics and experiences that intrinsically shaped the individuals in its region and remain as echoes in the experiences of the community in New Jersey today. We are able to uplift the power of locality and continue the work that the public media organisations dedicated themselves to when they chose their stories to cover and offered their microphone to the folks in their communities.
Then, there is the experience of getting to know these folks – the sounds of their voices, the topics they discuss, the way they move in front of the camera. To imagine sitting in an orange armchair in 1980, in a wallpapered living room that may still smell like dinner, turning on WNET/Thirteen and letting Kent Manahan update you on the Newark teachers’ strike. Maybe you see your neighbour interviewed or learn how the local schools are funded.3 Maybe you receive updates on the New Jersey Gems, the local team of the Women’s Professional Basketball League, a precursor to the force of the WNBA.4
This type of transformative engagement with archival materials aligns with the affective possibility of the archive.5 Affect encompasses the emotional resonance of an object — how it relates to your sensory experience, the feelings it evokes, its connection with your own identity or understanding of yourself and the world around you. I am in my mid-twenties – 1979 is longer ago than my life has been thus far, a kind of length of memory I cannot understand but can only imagine abstractly. I already feel the depth of our work, but for someone else, this is transportive. It is an opportunity to perhaps discover yourself and your memories. It can bring about feelings of home or stuckness, nostalgia and regret. Imagine if you were interviewed yourself, or your mother was, or your childhood bully, or the neighbour you never spoke to but had always smiled at you. Attaching their name to the program through its metadata increases the chance that those folks can watch the people in their lives move again, to hear their voice, in the moment in time that lives in their memory.
Archivists grapple with their relationship with neutrality and objectivity, but, while there is recognition that human beings will have biases, it follows that they will have their own personal responses. Human involvement exhibits prejudice at the same time as it can be an asset, a motivating force. It is their responsibility to determine how to approach their own role in their work. Our work during this spring semester would not have progressed as it did without our individual connection with and care for the materials that developed over the weeks. We saw Kent Manahan, a long-time anchor at New Jersey Network, so often that she became important to us. Our determination that she be represented led us to refine our workflow to capture anchors we recognised by their faces, even if their names were never written on-screen. It was a decision to trust our human eyes and instincts in order to create a more holistic understanding of who appeared on New Jersey Nightly News and how often.
After sifting through multiple years of contributor names and attributes for the individuals we saw briefly or came to know, our conversations began to engage with the reality of how these specific people are remembered. Though we saw Kent Manahan in our work every day, as New Jerseyans had for the thirty years she was with the network, she had no Wikipedia page. Our work confirmed her notability and allowed me to research, write, and publish a Wikipedia entry for her. Because she is now cataloged as a contributor for multiple years of New Jersey Nightly News in the AAPB, the archive serves as confirmation of her daily, decades long contribution to broadcast news and evening traditions.
Though Kent Manahan’s presence in the programs demonstrated the breadth of her professional career and allowed us an opportunity to celebrate her achievements, some contributors named in the materials had attributes that required us to think critically about how to hold representation and respect at once. The New Jersey Nightly News featured some contributors in moments of trauma or as suspects of crime. What would it mean to be defined on the Internet only through these moments? To acknowledge what we saw and the questions of maintaining integrity, the right to be forgotten, and our ethical responsibilities as archivists and people, we developed annotations that identified sensitive material (^^sens) and content warnings (^^cw) for moments needing further evaluation or individuals who would not be searchable by their trauma. It is not quite an answer, but it is an acknowledgement of the subject’s experience and our own efforts to describe them with care and respect.
People are multifaceted and historical memory is not holistic. Cataloging human beings with respect already raises questions without clear, broadly applicable answers — even more so when using VLMs and LLMs that can add biases or automate moments that, if performed by humans, may have inspired important questions. Through the conversations that I had the privilege to have with the GBH staff and my fellow intern, it became clear to me that the human eye and human confirmation have their own kind of risks, but our involvement is crucial to the application of empathy and understanding in cataloging. Archival materials are made by humans, feature human subjects, or concern humanity by being present in our world. My work with GBH confirmed to me my own commitment to taking the human presence seriously—to approach archival description with critical thinking about the impact of words and existence in the archives, but also what it might feel like to be represented and remembered and what might be possible for users engaging with these memories of themselves and of others.
Footnotes:
- CLAMS, “CLAMS Project,” Brandeis LLC, last modified 2025, https://clams.ai/home/index.html. ↩︎
- SAA Council, “SAA Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics,” Society of American Archivists,last revised August 2025, https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-
and-code-of-ethics. ↩︎ - “New Jersey Nightly News; New Jersey Nightly News Episode from 09/08/1980,” 1980-09-08, New Jersey Network, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed April 15, 2026, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/
cpb-aacip-259-zk55jn18. ↩︎ - “New Jersey Nightly News; New Jersey Nightly News Episode from 11/18/1979,” 1979-11-18, New Jersey Network, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed April 15, 2026, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/
cpb-aacip-259-qv3c2j2d. ↩︎ - Michelle Caswell, Marika Cifor, and Mario H. Ramirez, “‘To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing’: Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives,” The American Archivist 79, no. 1 (2016): 60-61. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxysim.flo.org/stable/26356700. ↩︎
References:
Caswell, Michelle, Marika Cifor, and Mario H. Ramirez. “‘To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing’: Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives.” The American Archivist 79, no. 1 (2016): 56–81. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxysim.flo.org/stable/26356700.
CLAMS. “CLAMS Project.” Brandeis LLC. Last modified 2025. https://clams.ai/home/index.html.
“New Jersey Nightly News; New Jersey Nightly News Episode from 11/18/1979,” 1979-11-18, New Jersey Network, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed April 15, 2026, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-259-qv3c2j2d.
“New Jersey Nightly News; New Jersey Nightly News Episode from 09/08/1980,” 1980-09-08, New Jersey Network, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed April 15, 2026, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-259-zk55jn18.
SAA Council. “SAA Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics.” Society of American Archivists. Last revised August 2025, https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics.
