The Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship (PBPF) supports students enrolled in non-specialized graduate programs to pursue digital preservation projects at public broadcasting organizations around the country. The Fellowship is designed to provide graduate students with the opportunity to gain hands-on experiences in the practices of audiovisual preservation; address the need for digitization of at-risk public media materials in underserved areas; and increase audiovisual preservation education capacity in Library and Information Science graduate programs around the country.
WGBH has developed partnerships with LIS and Archival Science graduate programs at multiple universities: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Missouri at Columbia, University of Oklahoma at Norman, Clayton State University, and San Jose State University. Each school has been paired with local public media stations to host the Fellows: WUNC, KOPN, the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority, Georgia Public Broadcasting, the Center for Asian American Media in partnership with the Bay Area Video Coalition.
The University of Alabama has partnered with WGBH to adopt and launch their own model of the PBPF program, providing both local and remote students enrolled in the University of Alabama’s School of Library and Information Studies with opportunities to pursue Fellowships at stations in their area. University of Alabama is currently partnered with WSRE in Pensacola, Florida; WCVE in Richmond, Virginia; and the University of Alabama Center for Public Television. The current Fellowship at the University of Alabama runs from the 2023 Fall – 2023 Spring semesters.
Over the course of the Fellowship, each Fellow inventories, digitizes, and catalogs a small collection of audiovisual media; generates technical and preservation metadata; and processes the digital files for ingest into the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. The Fellows will collaborate with a Faculty Advisor at their university to document their work in a 3-5 page handbook and video demo. The Fellowship also supports a digitization station at each university for the use of the Fellows and future students enrolled at the universities.
For more information about what being a Fellow entails, visit About the Fellowships.
For more information about our partners and how to apply, visit Project Partners.
