The Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship

The Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, supports students enrolled in non-specialized graduate programs to pursue digital preservation projects at public broadcasting organizations around the country. The Fellowship is designed to provide graduate students with the opportunity to gain hands-on experiences in the practices of audiovisual preservation; address the need for digitization of at-risk public media materials in underserved areas; and increase audiovisual preservation education capacity in Library and Information Science graduate programs around the country.

WGBH has developed partnerships with library and information science and archival science graduate programs at five universities: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Missouri, University of Oklahoma, Clayton State University, and San Jose State University. Each school is paired with a local public media station to host the Fellows: WUNC, KOPN Community Radio, the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority, Georgia Public Broadcasting, and the Center for Asian American Media in partnership with the Bay Area Video Coalition. The first Fellowship will run over the 2018 spring semester, from January-April of 2018; the second will run over the summer semester from June-August of 2018. The five host sites will overall support ten total fellowships.

Over the course of the fellowship, each fellow will inventory, digitize, and catalog a small collection of audiovisual media; generate technical and preservation metadata; and process the digital files for ingest into the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. The fellows will collaborate with a faculty advisor at their university to document their work in a 3-5 page handbook and video demo. The fellowship will also support a digitization station at each university for the use by the fellows and future students enrolled at the universities.

Stay up-to-date with the PBPF project by visiting http://pbpf.americanarchive.org.