Fellows took part in the program while enrolled in a partner Graduate Program. For more information about the Graduate Programs and the application requirements, see the Project Partners page. Fellows were assigned a Faculty Advisor to supervise and support their work throughout the Fellowship, and were also matched with a Local Mentor in their region with experience in audiovisual preservation to provide additional guidance and training.
Prior to the start of the Fellowship, Fellows were included in a series of free educational webinars over the summer prior to the start of the Fellowship to provide basic training in audiovisual preservation concepts such as digital preservation best practice and the use of the PBCore metadata schema, as well as professional development and cultural competencies, in collaboration with the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) Pathways Fellowship program.
The Fellowship began with an in-person Immersion Training led by Jackie Jay, Videotape Digitization Specialist and owner of Farallon Archival Consulting, during which the Fellows gained hands-on experience in appraisal, handling, and digitization of sound and audiovisual material. The Immersion Training ran over three days, with all travel costs covered and organized by the Fellowship.
Following Immersion Week, Fellows were expected to work 16 hours/week on the Fellowship over fourteen weeks of the Fall and Spring semesters over the academic year, for a total of 224 hours per semester. Approximately half of that time was spent at a digitization station set up in collaboration between the Graduate Program and the Host Station. Each Fellow:
- inventoried and assessed the material identified by the Host Station for preservation
- digitized the materials at the digitization station
- created detailed catalog records for the digitized material
- collaborated with AAPB archivists to implement the AAPB’s workflow for submission of the materials into the AAPB for digital preservation, including creating proxy files, generating preservation and technical metadata, and ingesting metadata into the AAPB’s Archival Management System
- researched the significance of the collection and created a special collection to highlight the materials within the AAPB
- wrote a blog post about the collection for the station and the AAPB
- collaborated with the Faculty Advisor at the Graduate Program to document their audiovisual preservation work with the creation of a 3-5 page handbook and a video tutorial on use of the equipment for the benefit of future students
- wrote a short digital preservation plan for the use of the Host Station to ensure they can properly care for and retain access to the digitized materials
Fellows kept in touch with each other throughout their Fellowships virtually through online collaboration tools and also attended three educational webinars over the course of the Fellowship. Fellows also received travel funding to attend the AMIA fall conference.
After completion of the 2023 Fellowships, the IMLS Fellowships are currently on hiatus. Further Fellowships may be offered in the future if funding becomes available.
Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship 