PTV Digital Archive

40th Annual Conference of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA)
20-25 September 2009 in Athens, Greece
by Kara Van Malssen
the author (left) and Karen Cariani (WGBH Media Library and Archives) in front of our poster on sustainability issues for public broadcasting preservation
From 20-25 September 2009, the 40th annual conference of the International Association of Sound [...]

One of the final projects of Preserving Digital Public Television is an assessment of sustainability for television archives in the public broadcasting system.
While our final report is still in process, we’ve found a number of issues related to sustainability that are not unique to moving images and television, but which seem likely to reflect much [...]

As part of our digital preservation initiative, we have saved copies of the majority of websites related to the public television system in 2007 - more than 300 websites of stations, program productions, and related organizations. 
Working with the Internet Archive, we will be transferring our 5 terabytes of data to the Library of Congress in [...]

Current, “the newspaper about public TV and radio,” has a very nice two page article about PBcore by Marcia Brooks, who helped develop the proposal for CPB funding of the PBCore project and directed the project at WGBH for most of the last six years. Some of the main points:

Almost six years ago CPB had [...]

The Dutch national audiovisual archive Beeld en Geluid, and its partners in the Images for the Future project are in the process of digitizing 22,500 hours of film, 137,000 hours of television, 124,000 hours of radio recordings, and 2.9 million photos. They have received an investment of 154 million euros from the Dutch government that [...]

At long last! Dave MacCarn’s outstanding survey of file formats and practices in public television production and distribution is now available.
Survey of Digital Formatting Practices in Public Television
We hope this will be useful to organizations that are facing the sometimes daunting prospect of making choices about how to archive video files for preservation.
Please contact us [...]

Last week, I participated in an all-day seminar hosted by the Museum ofthe Moving Image in Queens. It was sponsored in part by a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), which provides federal funding to libraries and museums.
IMLS has been supporting an impressive range of innovative projects to help their [...]

For project team members out on the road and in need of a project summary on paper, we now have a spiffy new Project Summary.

Everything Old Can Be New Again, Nan Rubin’s article in Current, the newspaper about public TV and radio, offers an overview of PBS archives, plans for the future, and advice for station managers concerned about preservation and access. Here’s an excerpt:
It’s time to get over our wasteful habit of letting our programs vanish forever. We’ve [...]

Thirteen/WNET New York invites you to check out the finding aid for our newly remastered landmark public affairs series, The 51st State.
http://www.thirteen.org/the51ststate/

On the air from 1972-1976, The 51st State began as a nightly news program with a mission to present in-depth and thoughtful reporting of regional issues.  During this period, New York City was struggling [...]