How we use PBCore
The New York Public Radio Archives encompasses collections from WNYC, WQXR, and the broadcasts from NYPR’s performance venue, The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space. Our catalogue currently lists more than 44,000 assets with nearly 80,000 instantiations, covering the wide range of analog and digital audio formats, from lacquer discs to wav files. In addition, the catalog also includes HD and DV CAM digital video tapes of material streamed at both WNYC.org and WQXR.org. In the near future we expect to begin adding both program guides (dating back to the 1930s) and photographs (as early as 1924) to the PBCore compliant catalog.
Why we use PBCore
Our current SQL catalog database is an outgrowth of an older MS Access database. The MS Access database, although not fully PBCore-compliant, was already informed to some extent by PBCore. The use of PBCore allows us to use a cataloging standard built specifically for the public broadcasting community while being well-documented and used broadly enough to facilitate future exchanges and updates to our catalog, particularly within the public broadcasting community. As a web-based standard the NYPR archives staff expects that PBCore will also easily allow for the addition of more sophisticated features such as streaming, meta-tagging or “automated” cataloging. We look forward to exploring this further. We also believe that PBCore is a significant improvement over other more print oriented metadata schemas and will go a long way toward addressing the needs of growing multimedia organizations.
Contact
Andy Lanset
Director of Archives
New York Public Radio
646.829.4381
alanset@nypublicradio.org
