WGBH Educational Foundation

The WGBH Media Library and Archives, in collaboration with Northeast Historic Film, Cambridge Community Television, and the Boston Public Library, will develop the Boston TV News Digital Library: 1960–2000, the first online resource offering a city’s commercial, noncommercial, and community cable TV news heritage to educators and the public. The purpose of the collaboration is to use, test, and demonstrate open source tools to assist custodians of similar resources, while creating an online library offering 40 years of urban moving image materials, resulting in approximately 70,000 news records. The project will establish a new collaborative model for community institutions committed to collection stewardship; combine all known Boston heritage television collections to develop a comprehensive digital library in a powerful open source repository with a dynamic front end; preserve and make accessible unique digital assets with comprehensible rights and relevant descriptive metadata; research and create essential rights modules for clarifying legal issues relating to local TV news collections; provide curricular context for study of urban history using primary source materials in classrooms and at community institutions; and devise an outreach strategy to raise awareness of the individual collections and the new digital library to support sustainability.