LOS ANGELES (February 10, 2023) – Digital Bedrock, a provider of secure, managed digital preservation services, has been selected by the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB), to help in the preservation of historically significant public radio and television programs from producers and stations across the United States.
A collaboration between the Library of Congress and public media leader GBH in Boston, the AAPB digitizes, preserves and makes accessible this content. A recent grant from the Mellon Foundation will support digitization of up to 150,000 items, doubling the current size of the AAPB collection.
Approximately 4 PB of data will be produced from the digitization efforts. Digital Bedrock will participate in the workflow by storing and maintaining preservation files awaiting ingestion by the Library of Congress. The company will receive digitized public broadcasting radio and TV programs, organize them, create checksums, write the files to 2 copies LTO8 media, and then perform annual fixity checks for the Library of Congress. The work is set to begin by the summer 2023, with the timeframe for the entire project extending for several years.
To perform this work, Digital Bedrock will use its appraisal and data organization tool, called the Data Appraisal and Reorganization Tool (DART). This is a different system than Digital Bedrock’s core Digital Preservation Application (DPA), which performs full preservation, file metadata extraction, format validation, and obsolescence checks. DART is used to select files received from clients based on the client’s appraisal policies, organize and rename (where required) batches of files, copy the data to a target destination, and initiate fixity (checksum creation and verification) actions.
According to Linda Tadic, Digital Bedrock CEO and Founder, “The radio and television programs included in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting’s collections, originating from all sizes of public broadcasting stations across the United States and its territories, is an important record of American and even global history. The programs document news, history, and culture, at the local level to the national. Digital Bedrock is honored to assist the AAPB’s important work.”
The AAPB contains nearly 100,000 items online available for the public to stream for free, dating back more than 70 years, with thousands more available for research access. Collections and content range from full episodes of groundbreaking public affairs programs like WNET’s Black Journal, unedited interviews recorded for series like Eyes on the Prize, the kid-driven ‘70s series ZOOM, and the entire “gavel-to-gavel” coverage of the Watergate Hearings. Exhibits delve into public media’s coverage of protests in America, Latino empowerment, Indigenous representation and much more. The AAPB was initiated by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with a series of pilot projects before granting stewardship to the Library of Congress and GBH in 2013.
More information about this grant award can be found here: GBH press release.