The Mellon Foundation has awarded Boston-based WGBH Educational Foundation with a $16 million grant to support the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.
The program is a WGBH initiative in collaboration with the Library of Congress to digitize, preserve and make accessible historic and significant public radio and television broadcasts from producers and stations across the country.
The fund is the largest private philanthropic grant WGBH has received, a spokesperson for the station said.
“We are grateful to the Mellon Foundation for their support of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. This vast collection of public media programs is American history as seen through local, regional and national lenses, but we are in a race against time to preserve these at-risk treasures now on fragile and obsolete formats,” said WGBH President and CEO Susan Goldberg. “The AAPB ensures that critical works of culture, news, arts and more are identified and made accessible to the public for years to come.”
The money will help WGBH — which includes radio station 89.3 FM and WGBH-TV (Channel 2) — to identify public broadcast collections that are suitable for preservation, and prioritize digitization and ingestion of collections that represent diverse American voices that are stored on at-risk forms of media. The money will help WGBH and the Library of Congress digitize around 150,000 items, which is double the current size of the collection.
“This grant from the Mellon Foundation is a recognition of the AAPB’s vital work in preserving decades of American history, told through the diverse voices and perspectives of stations across the country and U.S. territories,” said Karen Cariani, the David O. Ives Executive Director of the WGBH Media Library and Archives and WGBH Project Director for the AAPB. “With this funding, the AAPB will be able to better support its contributing stations as well as the growing number of users who rely on our digital archive for education, journalism, scholarship and more.”
“The preservation of public media is as critical as its creation. Mellon’s commitment to help ensure the longevity of this multi-vocal cultural and civic heritage will provide future generations opportunities to understand themselves and their communities in more complete ways,” said Patricia Hswe, Program Officer for Public Knowledge at The Mellon Foundation. “I’m thrilled that GBH, in collaboration with the Library of Congress, will be able to pursue this rescue work on a large scale and make substantial progress in saving this endangered media.”
The AAPB collection currently contains more than 100,000 items from 70 years of broadcasting that are free for the public to stream.
