WGBH Educational Foundation

The WGBH Media Library will integrate three digitized archived television series--the New Television Workshop, Say Brother, and The Ten O'clock News--into a seamless virtual library that can be searched across the three archives. This Web-accessible collection will be a model for managing rich media resources so that engaging materials can be discovered, used, and reused for a variety of purposes. The library will be augmented by key historical interviews (both digital media and transcripts) from programs such as War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, and Vietnam: A Television History (which is housed at the University of Massachusetts' William Joiner Center for the Study of the Vietnam War). Many oral history Web sites currently organize material around archival collections and are not subject searchable. In addition, these collections generally provide no more than transcripts of interviews, sometimes supplemented with still photographs, and with only a small amount of audio or video available. This project will use the full range of media in the archive, including extensive video footage. It will demonstrate a process for creating online access to moving images and related resources that can be replicated by any archive, library, special collection, or museum. Since the ability to stream large amounts of moving images on the Web is constrained by the cost of bandwidth and storage issues, the project will also test alternative ways of delivering video, including the potential for providing DVDs of selected full interviews at a reasonable cost.