Opening Public Media Archives for Scholarly Access

Over the past 10 years, the WGBH Media Library and Archives has worked with scholars, including historians, to foster better use of its collections. This paper will discuss three WGBH online initiatives to make available historical public affairs programming and unused footage: Open Vault, the Boston TV News Digital Library, and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.  Open Vault offers over 2,000 videos from the WGBH archive.  Most of the content is either older public affairs programs such as The Advocates (1969-1974), which presented courtroom-style debates on controversial issues, or interviews recorded for landmark series such as Vietnam: A Television History (1983) and War and Peace in the Nuclear Age(1989).  The Boston TV News Digital Library brings together four television news collections to make available online stories produced in and about Boston from 1960 to 2000 on topics such as school busing, the oil crisis, racial profiling, feminism, the environmental movement, and local politics.  The American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a collection of 40,000 hours of public television and radio content selected for digitization by more than 100 stations across the country, will make public affairs programming, much of it locally produced from the 1950s to the present, available online for educational purposes.

Through several projects funded by the Mellon Foundation, IMLS, and NEH, WGBH MLA has worked closely with scholars to determine how best to accommodate their needs.  This paper will discuss challenges and opportunities that WGBH MLA has faced, including improving descriptive data to increase discoverability using newly developed technology; evaluating legal risk when creating online repositories of historical news media content; and using feedback from the public to help determine how best to focus preservation efforts. The paper also will discuss successful collaborations with scholars to curate online collections on a variety of historical topics.