Preserving Digital Public Television Project
Lead Partner: Thirteen/WNET-TV: Educational Broadcasting Corporation
Additional Partners: New York University; Public Broadcasting Service; WGBH, Boston
Public television's rich legacy documents America’s social history through programming not offered by commercial television. Programs like "Nature", "NOVA", and "Frontline" are only produced digitally, often in high-definition (HD). Digitally produced public television programs are at great risk of being lost because rapid changes in technology make new video formats and equipment obsolete quickly. Saving these digital programs today will ensure they live far into the future.
Objectives:
- Design an archive for the long-term preservation of today’s public television programs.
- Determine a suitable video "wrapper" to bundle and preserve the connections between metadata (data that provides information about what was recorded) and programs so the programs can be retrieved later and played back.
- Inventory, appraise, and select collections of public television programs to use as test data to develop best practices for preservation.
More detailed project information can be found at the Project Web site
Highlights:
- Paper: Survey of Digital Formatting Practices In Public Television Program Production (2007) (PDF, 72 Kb)
- Paper: Recommended Appraisal Guidelines For Selecting Born-Digital Master Programs for Preservation and Deposit with the Library of Congress (2006) (PDF, 463 Kb)
- Paper: Best Practices Survey (Draft 1) (2005) (PDF, 102 Kb)
- " . . . from the Archives." Examples of historic PBS television programs from the 1970s to the present.
- Interview with Nan Rubin, the principal investigator of the PDPT project.
- Howard Besser of the PDPT project is a digital preservation pioneer.
