Posted on by Casey Davis Kaufman

We’re moving! 15,000 boxes, that is!

 

Ever wonder what 15,000 boxes looks like? It’s likely that you haven’t, but if you check out the video below, you’ll find out!

The WGBH Media Library and Archives (MLA) just began the process of moving our off-site storage to a new location. Our off-site storage unit currently stores 15,000 boxes, or 400,000 items, within 8,000 square feet. While our WGBH vault stores our master-level programs and original materials, the archival records held in our off-site storage include all of our non-master, or circulating films and tapes, as well as over 60 years of administrative and legal records. Each box needs to be removed from its shelf; transported from the current location (shown in the video above) to the new location; and then placed in the exact same order as they were in the original location. Maintaining the original order allows our archivists to continue to record and monitor the exact location of each item, ensuring that we maintain efficient circulation of these materials for our producers, researchers, and other staff.

Peter Higgins, Archives Manager, with assistance from Rebecca “Becky” Philio, Archivist, is leading this important effort to protect WGBH’s archival records and materials and securely transfer them to the new location. The move will be completed within the next several weeks, and we’ll look forward to showing you the “after” photos and videos!

Peter Higgins, Archives Manager
Becky Philio, Archivist

 

To be continued…

Posted on by Casey Davis Kaufman

1991 solar eclipse footage from NOVA

We’re getting ready for this month’s solar eclipse and thought we’d share this historic footage from the WGBH vault! In July 1991, NOVA recorded the particularly long six and a half minute total solar eclipse atop the dormant volcano Mauna Kea, the location of a major astronomical observatory in Hawaiʻi. The footage, originally shot on 16mm film, was featured in NOVA’s 1991 documentary Eclipse of the Century and has been digitized and preserved by the WGBH Media Library and Archives.

Posted on by Casey Davis Kaufman

Help us improve Open Vault and earn an Amazon gift card!

WGBH’s Media Library & Archives  (MLA) is currently seeking participants for a usability study of our online Open Vault digital archive. We are seeking five participants from the public media community and five scholar participants. The study will last about an hour or less, and all participants will receive a $20 Amazon gift card.

We are collaborating with Simmons College graduate student researchers Derek Murphy and Anna Boutin to learn about ways that Open Vault can be improved to make it easier and more enjoyable to use.  You do not have to be located in Boston to participate – the study is conducted long-distance over the internet. You’ll connect with our researchers using the video conferencing tool GoToMeeting (Simmons College will provide the software) and share your screen with them while you use Open Vault’s various features. This way, we can get your thoughts on where the website works and where it could use some work. Your participation would greatly help us make Open Vault the best it can be, and would also help our student researchers learn more about usability and media archives!

If you are interested in participating in the usability study, please send an email to Casey Davis, MLA Senior Project Manager at casey_davis@wgbh.org.

Posted on by Casey Davis Kaufman

Join us at the new WGBH Satellite Studio @ BPL!

On Thursday, October 20 at 11am, WGBH Media Library and Archives (MLA) staff will host an event at WGBH’s new satellite studio in the Newsfeed Cafe at the Boston Public Library’s Johnson Building! Join us that day to learn about WGBH’s history and about the historic collections preserved and made accessible by the MLA.

WGBH MLA staff Leah Weisse, Production Archival Compliance Manager, and Casey Davis, MLA Senior Project Manager, will meet with library patrons and the public to discuss WGBH’s history, its productions, and provide an overview of the activities of the WGBH Media Library and Archives. Attendees will explore some of the historic audio and video content that is preserved by the WGBH Archives, and Leah and Casey will provide a demo showing attendees how to access WGBH’s historic collection of television, radio, and other materials.

For more info contact Casey Davis at casey_davis@wgbh.org. We hope to see you there!

wgbh_studio
WGBH’s new satellite studio at the Boston Public Library. Photo credit: Casey Robidoux WGBH News
Posted on by Casey Davis Kaufman

User Funded Digitization

We’re happy to announce that the first Open Vault user funded digitization of a program has been completed and is now available to listen to online!

The program audio comes from the series, The Advocates episode 103 “Should the Law Permit Voluntary Euthanasia for the Terminally Ill?”

You can access the program audio by clicking this link.

If you haven’t tried requesting digitization or transcription of a program, it’s easy!

First register for a free Open Vault account and login.

Then search for a record of interest and click the “Request Digitization” or “Request Transcript” button.

That’s it!  You will then receive more information about your request via email from WGBH.

Posted on by Casey Davis Kaufman

The New Open Vault

MLA_logo_greye

As you’ve probably seen, Open Vault looks a little different than it did a month ago. The WGBH Media Library and Archives team have been hard at work revamping the website for over a year now and we’re happy to announce some new features you’ll be able to take advantage of.

Scholar Collections
You’ll notice on the right side of the homepage there are Scholar Collections. During the past year we’ve completed a project where scholars were granted access to WGBH material of all kinds of topics and then created articles based on their research. We’re pleased to announce that those articles, as well as related media and content, are now available on Open Vault as part of the Scholar Collections.

Browse WGBH Series and Programs
Another new feature of Open Vault is the ability to browse material that WGBH has in it’s Media Library and Archives. On the top of any page if you click on the “Series” button you’ll be taken to a page with an alphabetical list of all the Series we have material for in the Archives. Clicking on a particular Series title, you’ll be taken to a page listing the Series description as well as a list of Programs. If you click on a Program title, you’ll be taken to a page that has the description of the Program. If audio, video, or image material is available and digitized on Open Vault from a particular program, you’ll also be able to see that there as well.
We’re exposing our collection to the public in hopes to gain interest and provide access.

Request Digitization of Audio Video or Transcript
A feature that we introduced on the Boston TV News Digital Library website (bostonlocaltv.org) is the ability to request that a program be digitized. As part of this Open Vault relaunch, we’re including the ability to request a digital transcript be made of a program as well.
How it works is if you register for a free account on Open Vault, when you navigate to a page where no video is streaming and/or no transcript is viewable, you have the ability to pay for the digitization yourself by clicking the “Request Digitization” or “Request Transcription” button. This will send an email to the WGBH MLA staff and someone will be in contact with you about how much it would cost you to make that request digitized and available on Open Vault (rights permitting).  Think of it as a sponsorship of the preservation of the asset as well as helping to pay to make it accessible for everyone on the internet.

Improved Features
Even features that worked well on the older version of the Open Vault website have been given slight upgrades. You should notice improved browser compatibility, even on mobile devices. The video player is improved and navigating longer length media is easier. If a transcript exists for a video file and you jump to a specific point in the video, the transcript should automatically move there as well.

As with any website re-launch, there are still some bugs the development team is hard at work on so if any functionality is missing or a link is broken, rest assured we’re hard at work trying to resolve those issues quickly. Thank you for your patience.

Please feel free to direct any comments or questions to openvault[at]wgbh[dot]org.

Thank you for taking the time to use Open Vault and we look forward to bringing additional access to users in the future.

-WGBH Media Library and Archives

Posted on by Casey Davis Kaufman

1st reel of legendary James Brown concert returned to ‘GBH

James Brown performing at the Boston Garden in 1968.

The Media Library and Archives has long been in possession 2nd and 3rd reel of the 1968 James Brown concert, an event credited with keeping the peace after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It wasn’t until a few months ago that members of our stock sales team discovered that the original 2inch videotape of the first hour of the concert, missing all these years, was in storage with the James Brown Estate. As part of the licensing agreement for the upcoming documentary on James Brown, the stock sales team negotiated the deposit of a preservation quality digital surrogate into the WGBH Archives.

To share this recent discovery with other WGBH staff, the MLA arranged for a screening of the “lost reel.” Employees took time out of their busy schedules to relive a famous night in Boston history. The screening included the best of the “lost” first reel, which had lots of technical sound difficulties. This included a rare performance of Brown singing “If I Ruled the World” and James Brown addressing the audience in a unique moment. In addition, a second James Brown performance of “Going to Kansas City,” as well as powerful words from Brown, City Councilor Thomas Atkins, and Mayor Kevin White screened from the later reels.

One of the employees who attended was WGBH Jazz Gallery’s Al Davis, who was at the concert in 1968. Davis was kind enough to get up and share a few words with his fellow employees. He spoke of how his mother wasn’t sure she should let him go to the concert. He was ultimately allowed to go and headed down to the Boston Garden on the Orange Line. The event was very meaningful to him, especially since James Brown was such an important mentor to young black students at the time. Davis also recounted how under the urging of James Brown and others the crowd truly did remain peaceful after the concert.

You can watch clips from the concert, like this part of James Brown’s tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Posted on by Casey Davis Kaufman

From thousands of tapes to 17

On March 11, 2013, WGBH Media Library and Archives’ Archives Manager Keith Luf and Digital Archives Manager Michael Muraszko loaded 7,010 tapes from the WGBH vault onto 12 palettes, which were then shipped via an 18-wheeler to be digitized at Crawford Media Services in Atlanta, Georgia for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.  Only a few months later would the WGBH MLA in collaboration with the Library of Congress be selected as the permanent home for the American Archive collection, an initiative to identify, preserve, and make accessible as much as possible the historic record of public media in America.

WGBH’s tapes were stored in 306 archives boxes, totaling 459 linear feet (longer than 1 1/2 football fields!) and comprising more than 6,400 hours of content. In many cases, the archives staff knew only the program title of the tapes — they often knew nothing about the recorded participants. The content dated back as early as March of 1947 and was as recent as 2005. The MLA sent material on 15 different video and audio tape formats, the majority of which had exceeded the manufacturer’s intended lifespan. MLA’s Keith Luf compared the situation to a child’s 18 year old cat, which everyone knew wouldn’t — and couldn’t — be around much longer.

In June of this year, WGBH’s 6,400 hundred hours of content was returned. In addition to the original 7,010 tapes, the content was delivered as digital files on a second copy — on 17 LTO-6 tapes…. stored in one box!

From 7,010 tapes to 17!
From 7,010 tapes to 17!

And with the digitized material came a new ease of accessibility — the MLA staff have been able to easily watch or listen to the digital files and discover content they never knew had been sitting in the vault for all these years. Among the new discoveries includes a 1967 10-minute monologue by American historian and activist Howard Zinn on the social unrest of the times; a recorded speech given by JFK in either 1962 or 1963 at the Armory in Boston; and a 1975 video recording of a cello class taught by Harvard professor Mstislav Rostropovich, who during the recording asked a graduate student in his class “What kind of a name is Yo-Yo?”

As additional funding has become available, the MLA has recently coordinated with Crawford on the digitization of 800 more hours of 3/4″ videotapes and 1/4″ audiotapes, which will be shipped out next week.  Who knows what we’ll find next!?

Posted on by Casey Davis Kaufman

Interview With Marvin Minsky

Marvin Minsky, cognitive scientist and founding member of the MIT Media Lab, has been called the “Father of Artificial Intelligence.” His work, including some alongside fellow Media Lab founding member Seymour Papert, has been extremely influential in the study of artificial neural networks, especially building machines with the capacity for commonsense. One of Minksy’s most well known works is The Society of Mind, published in 1988, which is also the name of a course he teaches at MIT.

Just two years after the publication of The Society of Mind, Minsky was interviewed for the WGBH production The Machine that Changed the World. In the interview he summarizes his book:

The society of mind theory is basically that in order to make a machine with the kind of versatility and resourcefulness that we take for granted in people, a good way to do that is to package into that machine a lot of different ways to represent knowledge and a lot of different ways to exploit it.  And this leads to a certain difficulty, is there a central place in this mechanical brain that’s in charge of everything and knows everything. And I think what I show in the book is that that really can’t be, because if different kinds of knowledge are represented in different ways, then the parts of the brain, the parts of the machine that’s doing all this really can’t communicate with each other very well.  And so you get a very different picture of identity. And I can’t explain it briefly, but it’s a three hundred page book and in it I think I show all sorts of new ways to explain problems that have bothered psychologists and philosophers for a long time, like what does it mean for a machine to be conscious.

The interview was over an hour long, and a full, unedited version has been digitized and made available. Minsky discusses much more than his recent publication, answering questions across a range of topics, including:

–       the history of research on the workings of the human brain

–       history and development of AI research

–       common sense knowledge in humans and computers

–       religion

–       impact of computer development on AI and cognitive science

–       science fiction

READ THE COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT HERE

Posted on by Casey Davis Kaufman

NYU Scholar Feasts on Vintage Joyce Chen Cooks Episodes

Iconic WGBH Cooking Show Host the Focus of Research by Prof. Dana PolanJoyce_Chen_Cooks_Logo

As an early pioneer in cooking shows, WGBH produced groundbreaking series such as Julia Child’s the French Chef and Joyce Chen Cooks. As a result, the WGBH Media Library and Archives is a treasure trove of classic culinary television footage and the first stop for scholars studying the cooking show genre. Dana Polan, a professor of Cinema Studies at New York University has returned to the Archives to study the work of an iconic WGBH host and once again, the footage in the Archives is at the center of his research.

Previously Polan visited the WGBH archives while researching his book Julia Child’s The French Chef (Duke University, 2011). This time around, he’s studying another famous female chef, Joyce Chen, who also used the WGBH airwaves to teach the public how to cook ethnic dishes in their own kitchens.  Joyce Chen, emigrated to America during the Chinese Revolution. After becoming a successful cookbook author and Cambridge restaurateur, she hosted Joyce Chen cooks on WGBH from 1966 to 1967. Polan’s latest work focuses on Joyce Chen within the context of the Chjnese emigré culture and its attempts to craft a version of Chinese cuisine that would appeal to urban professionals in the U.S.

Currently, eleven of the episodes Polan used in his research have been digitized and are available online to the public. These include Joyce Chen Cooks Peking Ravioli and Joyce Chen Cooks for Fussy Eaters. The vintage footage of these episodes allowed Polan to study the nuances of Chen’s personality and the techniques that made her a trailblazer in the history of television cooking.

Recently, Professor Polan presented his work at NYU’s 2014 Feast & Famine seminar series hosted by NYU’s Food Studies program. Additionally, he is working on a critical essay about Joyce Chen that will be published soon on Open Vault.

Throughout his research, Professor Polan, took extensive notes while viewing each episode. The summaries, program logs, and select descriptive metadata he provided to the Archives have made the series content much more accessible and discoverable by other researchers and scholars.

As a public media station, WGBH’s Media Library and Archive serves as a free resource to researchers and scholars as well as the general public. The Archives contain more than 500,000 audio, video, and related assets from WGBH’s more than 60 years of broadcasting

To search the digital collection of almost 4,000 video, audio, and related materials, click here. If you have inquiries about other assets in our collection, contact us at archives_requests [at] wgbh [dot] org, and consider a visit to the archives.