FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2025

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB), a collaboration between the Library of Congress and GBH Archives, goals are to preserve and make accessible material created for American public tv and radio such as voices, culture, and news from communities across the country.  The AAPB fortunately has had funding to support the growth and outreach of the collection, in addition to creating AI tools to help generate metadata.  With US federal funding sources shutting down, the future of support for public media archives in the US is limited.  How do we continue to support the needed staff, the contributors to the AAPB, and be responsible to the historic record?

The GBH Archives, in addition to the AAPB collaboration, is responsible for the preservation and access of the materials created by GBH, the public broadcasting station in Boston that provides over 30% of the content for the US public media system (PBS). GBH Archives website Open Vault provides access to GBH materials and is also facing funding cuts.

GBH Archives has had success with social media outreach, building a following, and licensing of GBH materials.
Highlighting the use of the collection by scholars, journalists, filmmakers, educators, and the public should support the value of the work. Licensing footage brings some revenue, but not enough to support the whole preservation and access ecosystem. The AAPB has been using non generative of AI tools to help create metadata to increase discoverability within the growing collection. Interest in the use of the collection to train tools, as a dataset, could be licensable, but what are the ethics and rights issues in allowing that? Identifying faces, or voices, raises concern. AAPB will share outreach work, the value of making content accessible (even if it might not be dollars), and some stories from the field.