8 Advisor Reviews / The Charleston Advisor / October 2020
www.charlestonco.com
ADVISOR REVIEWS—STANDARD REVIEW
American Archive of Public Broadcasting Date of Review: September 10, 2020
doi:10.5260/chara.22.2.8
Composite Score: HHH 7/8 Reviewed by: Warren Bareiss University of South Carolina Upstate, Spartanburg, South Carolina
Lizah Ismail Limestone College, Gaffney, South Carolina
Abstract The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) features almost 40,000 hours of audio and video recordings produced among noncommercial broadcasting stations across the United States from the late 1940s to the 2010s. All 40,000 hours of broadcasts are accessible at WGBH in Boston and at the Library of Congress. A large portion of those hours—about 7,000 programs—is directly available via online streaming at no cost via <https://americanarchive.org/>. Data pertaining to the entire collection is also accessible via the website. AAPB offers a wealth of audio and video programs for teaching, scholarship, and entertainment in a user-friendly interface that makes browsing and searching AAPB relatively easy for novice and expert searchers.
Pricing Options AAPB is freely accessible.
Product Overview/Description The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) is a collection of nearly 40,000 hours of audio and video recordings produced among more than 100 public broadcasting stations across the United States. All 40,000 hours of broadcasts are accessible at WGBH in Boston and at the Library of Congress. A large portion of those hours—about 7,000 programs—is directly available via online streaming at no cost via <https://americanarchive.org/>. Some of the collection not available online can also be accessed on a limited basis for research. Data pertaining to the entire collection is also accessible via the website. This review will focus primarily on programming and information freely available to any online users. Public broadcasting in the United States was initially envisioned as a decentralized system of local stations that would produce much of their own content and drawing the balance from other stations in the network (Engelman, 1996, p. 2, 63-106, 165-187). This arrangement meant that archiving of programs, if conducted at all, was left to hundreds of local radio and television affiliates and scattered archives. Most programming has been lost forever and whatever was preserved was stored in less-than-ideal facilities, according to AAPB project directors, Alan Gevinson and Karen Cariani (personal interview, July 7, 2020). In 2007, the Association of Public Television Stations (APTS) proposed to Congress that a national archive be funded to preserve tens of thousands of radio and television programs in a publicly accessible, climate controlled facility. Congress was initially supportive, and a pilot project was undertaken in 2009. Between 2010 and 2012, the American Archive Content Inventory project was underway; howev-
<wbareiss@uscuspstate.edu> <iismail@limestone.edu>
er, funding was drastically cut in 2011. Fortunes changed again in 2013 when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) which distributes Congressional funding throughout the U.S public radio and television systems contracted with Crawford Media Services to digitize 35,000 hours of programming. WGBH in Boston and the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. were selected as permanent stewards of the collection (“A Brief History of the AAPB”). Today, the entire collection is available for study at both sites, and a large portion is available online. The collection continues to grow as programs are digitized (Alan Gevinson and Karen Cariani, personal interview, July 7, 2020). The online collection is expansive, to say the least. Ranging from news broadcasts, to arts programming, to talk shows and children’s programming, AAPB provides a seemingly endless amount of information about life in the United States across eight decades. Sampling a few items, we started with a discussion program featuring the oddly mixed pairing of William F. Buckley and Groucho Marx. Once started, the program was hard to turn away from. Clearly, the two men had widely divergent political perspectives, and yet each clearly respected each other. The discussion crackled with insightful, profound, spontaneous, and sometimes cleverly barbed repartee rarely seen in television today. Another program we sampled was an interview with Muhammad Ali who had just been stripped of his title, and like the previously mentioned program, dialog between Ali and the show’s host was more than thoughtful. It was rich with nuance and references to culture, religion, politics, and history. While some of the terminology spoken has changed over the decades, both programs that we initially sampled touch upon topics that are as fresh today as they were when recorded: racism, intolerance, potentially offensive humor, and mediated representations of cultural groups. Unlike most broadcast and cable offerings today, however, these programs share a characteristically generous notion of time— time to really think and talk things through, time to respectfully disagree, time to let thoughts flow in multiple directions in a tempered, respectful meeting of the minds. The interviews are heavy on thoughtful discourse and light on staged performance. Rather than a slash and burn approach to issues of the day, these discussions leave the viewer with things to consider. This sense of patience might be said to be the hallmark of public broadcasting, and one can sense it in all kinds of programming throughout the online collection. Dozens of programs in the collection are sorted into topics titled Exhibits and Special Programs, both of which feature audio and video programs illustrating significant themes, topics, and events (see Figure 1). Among the 11 current Exhibits, for example, one focuses on the Black Power Movement from the mid-1960s into the early 1970s.
