BOSTON—The Mellon Foundation has awarded GBH $16 million to support the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB), a collaboration between GBH and the Library of Congress, that works to digitize, preserve and make accessible historically significant public radio and television programs from producers and stations across the United States. 

This grant will be the largest private philanthropic grant GBH has ever received.

“We are grateful to the Mellon Foundation for their support of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. This vast collection of public media programs is American history as seen through local, regional and national lenses, but we are in a race against time to preserve these at-risk treasures now on fragile and obsolete formats,” said GBH president and CEO Susan Goldberg. “The AAPB ensures that critical works of culture, news, arts and more are identified and made accessible to the public for years to come.” 

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.

The grant builds on previous support from the Mellon Foundation and will enable the AAPB to expand its work by: 

• Identifying collections suitable for preservation; 
• Prioritizing digitization and ingestion of collections representing the diversity of American voices currently stored on at-risk, deteriorating media formats; 
• Supporting the digitization of up to 150,000 items, thereby doubling the current size of the collection; 
• Participating in the development of open-source digital tools to improve content management;
• Enhancing the public website and supporting the needs of its growing and evolving user base;
• Expanding development of special collections and exhibits, outreach to communities of interest, and cultivation of an ethic of preservation throughout the public media community. 

“This grant from the Mellon Foundation is a recognition of the AAPB’s vital work in preserving decades of American history, told through the diverse voices and perspectives of stations across the country and U.S. territories,” said Karen Cariani, the David O. Ives executive director of the GBH Media Library and Archives and GBH project director for the AAPB. “With this funding, the AAPB will be able to better support its contributing stations as well as the growing number of users who rely on our digital archive for education, journalism, scholarship and more.” 

"The preservation of public media is as critical as its creation. Mellon’s commitment to help ensure the longevity of this multivocal cultural and civic heritage will provide future generations opportunities to understand themselves and their communities in more complete ways," said Patricia Hswe, program officer for public knowledge at The Mellon Foundation. "I'm thrilled that GBH, in collaboration with the Library of Congress, will be able to pursue this rescue work on a large scale and make substantial progress in saving this endangered media."

BOSTON—Big Bird, Elmo, Cookie Monster, Oscar the Grouch and the rest of the Muppets have lived on “Sesame Street” for the past 50 years, teaching children—and even some adults—valuable lessons on things like spelling, math and social and cultural issues. However, unlike the memorable title song asks, you can’t actually get to Sesame Street. But if you head to Boston or Washington, D.C., you can find these classic episodes readily available.

As part of its 50th anniversary celebration, Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit education workshop behind “Sesame Street,” has donated nearly 4,500 digital copies of episodes from its run, from its premiere in 1969 to its most recent episodes, to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a collaboration between the Library of Congress and the WGBH Educational Foundation.

Though the episodes have already been digitized, the archiving of these episodes by the AAPB so that they can be around for generations to come is a diligent process.

According to Rachel Curtis, the digital project specialist at the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus in Culpeper, Va., and project coordinator for the AAPB, after Sesame Workshop digitizes the episodes in-house, they send them to her via hard drives in batches covering 10 seasons from the show each. The files from the most recent seasons are in HD, with earlier episodes in SD.

Curtis takes the original files and creates a lower resolution access file so they can be sent to WGBH. The Library of Congress uses its own Packard Campus Workflow Application to convert the files to MP4s with an H.264 codec. The SD episodes come out to a bitrate of about 711 kbps, while the HD episodes are 1.5 mbps. The process of creating an access file, per Curtis, takes about 15 minutes. Those files are then transferred to WGBH via FTP.

“The first batch we received I’m just about finished with my testing and making sure all my scripts are working,” says Curtis. “... [O]nce all the kinks are worked out, it should move pretty quickly.”

In addition, the original files from Sesame Workshop are ingested into the Library of Congress’ own archive so they are available there in perpetuity.

When the files arrive at WGBH that’s when Casey Davis Kaufman, associate director of the WGBH media library and project manager for the AAPB, takes over. Her first task is to ingest the metadata, which she says can take from a few hours to a couple of days depending on how it complies with WGBH’s data model. The files are ingested through a Hyrax Avalon archival management system (AMS) that supports public broadcasting metadata standards.

To be able to find the episodes in WGBH’s system, an API pulls the metadata through the station’s platform so that it is searchable by keyword or series title.

“Once we get the first batch delivered from Rachel, we will go ahead and ingest that batch and make it available on site,” says Kaufman. “We’re thinking within the next six to eight weeks the first batch will be available for anyone who visits the Library or WGBH.”

The “Sesame Street” episodes—which include classic moments like “Farewell, Mr. Hooper,” “Rubber Duckie, You’re the One,” “Near/Far,” and Cookie Monster’s Monsterpiece Theater—will join more than 100,000 digitized items that the AAPB has amassed since 2013. Among those is footage from the Senate Watergate hearings, more than 8,000 episodes of “PBS NewsHour” and raw interviews from numerous documentaries on topics that range from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement. There is also archived materials from PBS’s predecessor, National Educational Television.

About 45,000 items from the archive are available to anyone throughout the country via AAPB’s online reading room. Though at this time, the “Sesame Street” collection will only be available by visiting the Library of Congress and by appointment at WGBH.

Here's a highlight reel of classic "Sesame Street" episodes that will be archived during this process:

Photos courtesy of Sesame Workshop