From 2018-2023 the Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship (PBPF) supported students enrolled in non-specialized graduate programs to pursue digital preservation projects at public broadcasting organizations around the country. The Fellowship was designed to provide graduate students with the opportunity to gain hands-on experiences in the practices of audiovisual preservation; address the need for digitization of at-risk public media materials in underserved areas; and increase audiovisual preservation education capacity in Library and Information Science graduate programs around the country.
Over the course of the Fellowship, each Fellow inventoried, digitized, and cataloged a small collection of audiovisual media; generated technical and preservation metadata; and processed the digital files for ingest into the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. The Fellows collaborated with a Faculty Advisor at their university to document their work in a 3-5 page handbook and video demo. The Fellowship also supported a digitization station at each university for the use of the Fellows and future students enrolled at the universities.
With support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), WGBH developed partnerships with LIS and Archival Science graduate programs at multiple universities: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Missouri at Columbia, University of Oklahoma at Norman, Clayton State University, San Jose State University, the University of Tennessee, the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, Dominican University, and Kent State University. Each school was paired with local public media stations to host the Fellows: WUNC, KOPN, KGOU, Georgia Public Broadcasting, the Center for Asian American Media in partnership with the Bay Area Video Coalition, East Tennessee PBS, ‘Ulu’ulu, WTTW, and WKSU.
After completion of the 2023 Fellowships, the IMLS Fellowships are currently on hiatus. Further Fellowships may be offered in future if funding becomes available.
The University of Alabama has partnered with WGBH to adopt and launch their own model of the PBPF program as part of the EBSCO Scholarship program, providing both local and remote students enrolled in the University of Alabama’s School of Library and Information Studies with opportunities to pursue Fellowships at stations in their area. University of Alabama is currently partnered with New Hampshire PBS; Arizona Public Television; Alabama Public Television; PBS North Carolina; City University of New York; and WNYC in New York. The current Fellowship at the University of Alabama will conclude in Spring 2024.
For more information about what being a Fellow entails, visit About the Fellowships.
For more information about our partners and how to apply, visit Project Partners.
For more information about applying for EBSCO Scholarships in Audio-Visual Preservation and Archiving at the University of Alabama School of Library and Information Studies, visit the University of Alabama website.
Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship 