The Corporation for Public Broadcasting began inventorying US public media content in 2007. By 2013, 2.5 million items had been inventoried including 40,000 hours of broadcasting which was being digitized with funding from the CPB. An advisory council, which included Ken Burns, John W. Carlin, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Cokie Roberts, Stephen D. Smith, Margaret Spellings, Howard Stringer, and Jesús Salvador Treviño, recommended that a collaboration between WGBH and the Library of Congress form and operate the archive. In the first phase of the project, which began in 2013, the Archive will complete the digitization of 40,000 hours of radio and television programs and select an additional 5,000 hours of born-digital programs to be included in the collection. The collection will be made available to the public on-site in Washington, DC and in Boston. A rights clearance strategy will be developed to comply with legal restrictions, including copyright law and a website will provide public access to much of the collection.
Other projects
Programs from National Educational Television, which operated from 1952 through 1972, are being cataloged in a project scheduled to be completed in 2018. 8,000–10,000 NET titles are expected to be cataloged and an incomplete preliminary list is currently online. The PBS NewsHour Digitization Project has made more than 13,500 episodes of PBS NewsHour and its predecessor programs available online. Transcripts of over 9,000 shows will also be made available. The Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship began in 2018 and supports graduate students enrolled in non-specialized programs to pursue digital preservation projects at public broadcasting organizations around the country. In 2020, the University of Alabama partnered with WGBH to adopt and launch their own model of the PBPF program, providing both local and remote students enrolled in the University of Alabama’s School of Library and Information Studies with opportunities to pursue Fellowships at stations in their area.
Special Collections and Exhibits
Some notable collections featured in the AAPB Special Collections include raw interviews from Eyes on the Prize, Ken Burns' The Civil War, and American Masters. The AAPB features exhibits on their website about the topics covered by American public broadcasting. AAPB Special Collections include notable selections of public radio and television content with a specified search bar for items within the collection, a detailed summary about the content, and related resources. Some of these collections feature individual series such as Say Brother, raw interviews from documentaries such as Eyes on the Prize, event coverage such as the Watergate Hearings, and selections of items related to specific themes, such as the LBGT+ Collection. In the AAPB curated Exhibits, curators select primary and secondary source recordings to present a diversity of perspectives concerning the exhibit's focus. These exhibits illuminate how public broadcasting stations and producers have covered the exhibit's theme.
