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PBCore Presentations from AMIA 2014

By on October 16, 2014

Members of the PBCore Advisory Subcommittee of the Association of Moving Image Archivists presented a session at the annual conference titled “Pursuing PBCore: The Revitalization of a Schema and Community.”

Session Chair Casey Davis began the discussion by generally highlighting the background and progress of the PBCore Advisory Subcommittee and called for the community to offer frank feedback on the future of the schema. “Good metadata standards not only provide a usable, understandable, and interoperable model for organizing data about common objects, but…more importantly — there should exist an engaged and forward-thinking community of stewards to carry the standard forward with the industry, as needs continue to change and as the community of users grows,” added Davis.

The session panelists included Jessica Bitely, Preservation Director at the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC); Jack Brighton, Director of New Media and Innovation at Illinois Public Media; John Passmore, Archives Manager at WNYC, and Mary Miller, Peabody Awards Collection Archivist at the University of Georgia.

Jessica explained and outlined the PBCore User and Non-User Survey and its results, as well as how the Education Team plans to address the issues identified in the survey. Jack Brighton and John Passmore provided case studies of how their institutions use PBCore, and Mary Miller provided a skeptic’s perspective on PBCore. Her complicated relationship with PBCore was well summarized in her quote, “I don’t love you, but I need you,” a feeling that many in the audience admitted to having.

But enough of this recap — you can see the slides yourself!

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Register for the PBCore webinar!

By on September 25, 2014

The AMIA PBCore Advisory Subcommittee is offering a webinar intended for archivists, librarians and other professionals who deal with audiovisual materials and are interested in learning about the PBCore metadata schema and data model.

This introductory webinar will help you learn what PBCore might have to offer your organization, as well as the best way to start using PBCore at your organization.

Register here for the webinar, which will be held Thursday, October 23, 2014 from 2-4 pm ET. The webinar will be recorded and made available to those who are unable to attend. The webinar room is first come, first serve — so try to join the room a few minutes early to claim your spot.

For those attending AMIA in Savannah, we also hope to see you are our PBCore session and business meeting!

Here’s the info:
Panel Session: “Pursuing PBCore: The Revitalization of a Schema and Community”
Friday October 10, 11am – 12pm

Bring your own lunch to the PBCore Advisory Subcommittee Meeting (anyone with an interest in PBCore is welcome to join!)
Friday, October 10, 12pm – 1pm
Verelist Room

And look for a PBCore Subcommittee member to get your own PBHardcore conference badge!

pbhardcore

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Mark your calendars for PBCore events at AMIA 2014

By on September 2, 2014

PBCore-logoFinal

Are you headed to Savannah for AMIA this year? Want to get the scoop on current PBCore developments?

If so, go ahead and block off your schedule for Friday, October 10 from 11am – 1pm — it’s going to be a PBHardcore couple of hours!

First, members of the AMIA PBCore Advisory Subcommittee will lead a session titled “Pursuing PBCore: The Revitalization of a Schema and Community.” Casey Davis will introduce the session and speakers and generally introduce the current efforts of the recently established PBCore Advisory Subcommittee. Jessica Bitely will report on the results of the PBCore User and Non-user Survey, highlighting some of the suggestions from the user community as well as the misconceptions brought to light by non-user respondents. Jack Brighton and John Passmore will present on how PBCore is used at their organizations, and Mary Miller will discuss why her organization doesn’t use PBCore. Dave MacCarn will lead a Q & A.

Following the panel session, the PBCore Subcommittee will convene its Business Meeting from 12pm – 1pm. All conference attendees are welcome to join! Bring your brown-bag lunch (and your opinions!) and hear from members of each team discuss the specific efforts of the five established teams — Schema, Education, Website, Documentation, and Communication. The meeting will include 30 minutes for open discussion.

Looking forward to seeing you in Savannah!

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PBCore Schema review needs your comments

By on August 18, 2014

The PBCore Schema Team is hot on the heels of the next version/update of the PBCore 2.x schema. They’re taking comments and feature requests until September 30, 2014 for the next schema release planned for March 2015.

All parties interested in contributing to the ongoing development and improvement of PBCore should please submit their issues with the current version of the standard to the PBCore GitHub issue tracker. Submitted issues may be related to any aspect of PBCore: the data model, XML schema, individual element or attributes, vocabularies, etc. We also invite you to comment on issues submitted by others.

The URL for the PBCore GitHub issue tracker is: https://github.com/WGBH/PBCore2.0/issues

For instructions on submitting issues to GitHub, please see Lauren Sorensen’s earlier blog post on PBCore.org.

PBCore is now being used by a great many public media organizations, film archives, broadcasters, libraries, and academic institutions. With your help, we’ll make the next version more useful for all concerned!

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PBCore and Dance Heritage Coalition’s “Media Network”

By on August 4, 2014

Dance Heritage Coalition (DHC) is bravely and gracefully pioneering the field of dance preservation. As a consortium of institutions holding significant collections documenting the history of dance, they are the only national non-profit organization taking on the special challenges of this field. Those challenges include preserving a multi-format legacy and providing access to its riches while protecting copyright restrictions of the artists and choreographers. This is the aim of DHC’s online “Media Network”, a grant-funded project to create a union research database of dance-related moving images (searchable prototype available at http://archive.danceheritage.org). We were especially excited to learn that PBCore was being used to create their unique records, and grateful that Rebecca Fraimow, the hub manager for DHC’s New York preservation hub, offered to tell us how!

Rebecca and her fellow hub managers in Washington D.C. and San Francisco work with local artists to help them preserve their work and perform audiovisual conservation and preservation for the database at each of the hub’s digitization stations. So far they’ve made tremendous progress! While some member archives have performed digitization, the majority of film and analog tapes and born-digital files of one-of-a-kind materials, including performances and interviews, are sent directly to the hubs to be digitized and added to the database. The database currently holds 28,000 PBCore records mapped from MARC records and nearly 800 streaming video.

PBCore allows for each asset on the “Media Network” to include multiple, linked records, including the jpeg for the thumbnail image of the video still, the digital instantiation, for which technical metadata is captured automatically with the upload, the digital backup file, and a physical instantiation. PBCore data fields include form, identification, title, description, and relation to other material, which can be linked to contextual materials like posters, programs and reviews.

For description that is unique to performance, Rebecca and her fellow hub managers map the data to match PBCore fields where they can, adding their own attributes. For example, many of the records have long lists of creative collaborators, such as costume designer, composer, etc.

Streaming of the digital files is available through log-in afforded to member archives, libraries, and education centers in order to prevent unauthorized copying. However, the site makes discovery of the assets possible: the metadata on the front end is extensive and transparent, and anyone searching the union database – scholar, faculty, student, or the general public – can find the location of the physical instantiation.

PBCore might not seem like the obvious choice for the sole national dance-related repository, but in the absence of a performance-based schema, 2.0′s multi-part instantiations and breadth of fields for flexible mapping are supporting DHC’s most essential metadata requirements.

This fall Rebecca will bring her digital preservation skills and creativity to WGBH as an NDSR awarded resident and we are thrilled to welcome her! Congratulations, Rebecca, and thank you for sharing your PBCore experiences with us!

Written by Bryce Roe, intern for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. Interview with Rebecca Fraimow, Preservation Hub Manager for Dance Heritage Coalition.

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PBCore at Smithsonian Channel

By on July 9, 2014

Recently I had the pleasure of talking with the Director of the Library and Archives at Smithsonian Channel, Karma Foley. This summer Smithsonian Channel is migrating to a more robust database, and Karma shared how PBCore is informing this expansion and helping the channel preserve their private collection in a file-based, CollectiveAccess environment.

Smithsonian Channel formed in 2005 as a joint venture between Showtime Networks and the Smithsonian Institution.  In 2007 they began broadcasting of their original content inspired by the museums and research facilities. The Library and Archives includes a mix of tape-based and file-based HD formats of raw footage for original programs as well as production elements and the finished products themselves. Karma joined in 2011 with the task of figuring out what the channel had and how to preserve it and make it accessible for re-use.

Karma first focused on establishing a basic database that would allow production staff to locate re-usable footage. Their in-house, unique database, SCOUT, is built on CollectiveAccess and is fairly simple. Currently, works and instantiations exist in one record and technical and descriptive metadata are tied together with PBCore acting as the consultant for controlled vocabulary and many elements. For their new model, PBCore 2.0 is being enlisted as a way of describing separate but related works and instantiations, which will be especially helpful for describing their older tapes that have been digitized.

The team picks and chooses specific PBCore elements and vocabulary and modifies others to suit their collection. Elements that help to describe pieces of the broadcast production process are especially helpful. Karma noted that, “One of the best things about PBCore is that it was created by people who know about broadcast and production, which our new data model will focus on, whereas our current model just focuses on individual video assets.” Film and analog video terms don’t apply to their collection, so those are stripped and replaced by additional terms for born digital and file-based formats.

Karma has also brought archival and PBCore thinking to the production end. Strict file naming starts before or right after material is shot so that a unique ID is associated with it from the beginning. Descriptive and technical metadata are gathered early on as well. This is done through a spreadsheet that all original productions must deliver when the project wraps. Specific metadata for each media item (such as a tape, disc, or card/folder of footage) must be supplied following a template that includes columns for date, location, description, media type, recorder brand/model, file format/codec, frame rate, and resolution. Having the production team enter this data ensures a greater level of accuracy and helps to keep track of media during production and edit. When the project wraps, the data is double-checked by Archives staff and then mapped into the database.

Smithsonian Channel’s collection is private and their database is for internal use only, so the data sharing capabilities of PBCore XML and the implementation of attributes are not primary benefits of the schema for their collection. However, Karma believes that incorporating standards is a good idea while working to develop a data model that best suits their unique collection.

What is most inspiring is how PBCore is helping to inform Smithsonian Channel’s production workflow that is both preservation minded and forward thinking. Karma noted that PBCore allows for more detailed technical metadata than they are currently describing, and she is especially anxious to explore automated ingest of metadata from media files that will improve the level of detail in technical metadata collected.

Best of luck during this exciting endeavor, Karma, and thank you for sharing your PBCore experiences with us!

Written by Bryce Roe, intern for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. Interview with Karma Foley, Director of Library and Archives at Smithsonian Channel.

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Continue to provide PBCore feedback through GitHub issues!

By on June 25, 2014

As the PBCore committee analyzes data coming from our survey (thank you, community!) we wanted to take a moment to let you know how we’ll be tracking community feedback going forward  – we welcome and encourage your continued input!

In a short few steps, you can sign up for a Github.com account and submit “issues” in the PBCore 2.0 repository. Github is a website used primarily by coders to track versions using a tool called Git, share open-source code, create documentation and build software. But if you’re not a coder, don’t let that intimidate you! In a few simple steps, you can help us use it to build a better schema (and perhaps spark an interest in using Github for other applications as well!).

To start out, point your browser to http://www.github.com/join

Next, choose a username and password. This should be individual to you, as Github distinguishes between individual accounts and organizational accounts.  After that, Github will ask you to choose a plan. If you’re a beginner user, we recommend the free plan:

Click continue, and Github will send a confirmation email to verify your account. Then, you’ll be all set to submit your PBCore issues!

To track issues, while logged in, navigate to: http://www.github.com/WGBH/PBCore2.0/issues

You’ll then be greeted with the interface below, where you can submit an issue for the PBCore schema committee to review. You can even follow discussion happening on the issue ticket as it happens!

The PBCore website committee will be assigning the Labels you see on the left, so need to worry about that.

Here is the interface when an issue is created. Please include a brief summary of your issue, and an extended summary below the header. You can take a look at existing examples for inspiration. The only hard and fast rule is specificity in articulating your need: we can’t address your concern without it!

If you would like to learn more about Git, Github and version control please comment on this post and we’ll follow up in a future blog with more information and resources.

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PBCore data exchange with the Pop Up Archive

By on June 19, 2014

You may have heard about the Pop Up Archive, which if you haven’t, you should. From my vantage point, they are solving a key problem of radio producers (and anyone creating digital audio) by providing:

- A simple way to upload and preserve the highest-resolution digital audio files with the Internet  Archive as the back end

- A cataloging tool for creating descriptive metadata to audio assets and collections

- An automatic metadata extraction tool for additional metadata, including full speech-to-text – transcripts

- An embeddable audio player for each asset so you can add them to your web pages.

Funded by the Knight Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pop Up Archive is carving out an important niche in preserving public radio for local stations and independent producers, like the Kitchen Sisters and Studs Terkel. Partners include KQED, WCRW, StoryCorps, NPR, and my station WILL.

You can find out more about the Pop Up Archive on their main website, and on their Tumblr blog.

I’m excited about the potential for this kind of service, but what makes me really happy is they are set up to ingest audio archives via PBCore.  And here’s the best part: this can be done automatically with zero extra effort on the part of anyone. How does this work?

At WILL our producers (news reporters, program hosts and producers) create audio content for broadcast that also gets published to our website. They use a standard workflow to get the content into our website Content Management System, where it goes out to the web as web pages and RSS feeds. As with most CMSs, content is presented to the front end (i.e. actual people) with a template system that pulls data from a database and builds HTML pages dynamically based on a given page url.  RSS feeds are created the same way, with XML feeds built dynamically from a given feed url.  Examples:

Web page: http://will.illinois.edu/news

RSS feed: http://will.illinois.edu/news/rss

We took this one step further, and using the same method built a PBCore template based on the 2.0 schema. This is an XML template similar to an RSS feed, but the PBCore schema is a bit more complex and has more detailed metadata.  Our PBCore feed uses pbcoreCollection as the root element, and by default includes the most recent 10 items.

PBCore feed: http://will.illinois.edu/news/pbcorecollection

The Pop Up Archive has a PBCore parser that checks this feed every day or so, and ingests any new content since the last check. Think of it this way: If you use iTunes to subscribe to podcasts, iTunes is doing the exact same thing with podcasts. The difference is the PBCore feed contains much more metadata. And after ingesting my content the Pop Up Archive is adding a ton of services to transcribe and preserve the audio content and the metadata.

Enabling exchange of media content and metadata with services like the Pop Up Archive is exactly why PBCore was designed. The American Archive ingests media archives and data the same way. As more services adopt PBCore as an ingestion format, and more producers become PBCore data sources, the universe of public media content that is both web-accessible and preserved for the long term will expand.

It’ll be even more interesting to see what we can do with that.

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PBCore is Back in Action!

By on March 18, 2014

PBCore is back in action! As part of the American Archive initiative, WGBH in collaboration with the Library of Congress has been charged with further developing PBCore (Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary). The goals of the project are to:

  • Strategize direction for the PBCore schema
  • Improve the PBCore website
  • Solicit submissions from the public
  • Vote on submissions to improve PBCore
  • Develop resources and provide learning opportunities for organizations interested in using PBCore
  • Encourage and support the use of the standard

As the work progresses in the next few months, you’ll be seeing a lot of changes to the PBCore website and a lot of activity on the PBCore blog. So stay tuned for a new and improved website, schema, and a variety of new resources that will help your organization adopt and use PBCore!

The project is being coordinated the American Archive of Public Broadcasting project team. To form the PBCore Advisory Subcommittee, WGBH’s Project Manager Casey Davis reached out to public media stakeholders from universities, archives, and industry to assemble a group of 41 people, who will work in four groups:

Website  (http://pbcore.org/)

  • Review the PBCore website and other standards websites
  • Identify ways in which the website can be improved and become more user-friendly
  • Review existing record examples and create new examples for the website

Schema Development

  • Gather input from the PBCore Advisory Subcommittee for ideas on schema improvement
  • Consider suggestions provided by the community
  • Develop and implement revisions to the schema
  • Explore opportunities for EBUCore harmonization and RDF implementation

Communications

  • Create the PBCore newsletter
  • Provide updates to organizations and listservs
  • Gather schema development submissions from the public
  • Implement a strategy for communication and outreach to adopters and potential adopters
  • Manage the PBCore blog (http://pbcoreresources.org/)

Education

  • Create, communicate, and disseminate effective learning opportunities for PBCore adopters and potential adopters
  • Develop resources that will be shared on the blog and website, ie FAQs
  • Create instructional videos and conduct webinars
  • Strategize other opportunities for teaching the standard

We’re proud to have such a professionally diverse group of contributors to the project. Members include:

Steering Team
Jack Brighton, Illinois Public Media
Karen Cariani, WGBH
Casey E. Davis, WGBH
Dave MacCarn, WGBH
Kara Van Malssen, AVPreserve
Lauren Sorensen, Library of Congress
Anne Wootton, PopUp Archive

Education
Chair: Anne Wootton, PopUp Archive
Caitlin Birch, Frontline | WGBH
Jessica Bitely, Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC)
Kevin Carter, WGBH
Nick Connizzo, George Washington University
Jeremy Meserve, Belmont Media Center
Bill Nehring, Simmons College | MLIS Candidate
Nancy Watrous, Chicago Film Archive

Schema Development
Chair: Kara Van Malssen, AVPreserve
Margaret Bresnahan, Minnesota Public Radio
Andrea Leigh, Library of Congress
Glenn Clatworthy, PBS
Tom Davenport, Folkstreams
Glynn Edwards, Stanford University
Jean-pierre Evain, EBUCore
Leigh Grinstead, LYRASIS
Jimi Jones, Hampshire College
Steve Knoblock, Folksreams
Devon Landes, HBO
Dave MacCarn, WGBH
Mary Miller, Peabody Awards
John Passmore, WNYC-FM
Allison Smith, Wisconsin Public Radio
Adam Wead, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Leah Weisse, WGBH

Website
Chair: Lauren Sorensen, Library of Congress
Jolene Beiser, Pacifica Radio Archives
Ashley Blewer, University of South Carolina
Nestor Cordova, University of Texas
Jeff Eastman, IMF
Ryan Edge, University of Illinois
Andrew Myers, WGBH
Alexander Papson, University of Notre Dame
Dave Rice, City University of New York
Deanna Ulvestad, Greene County Public Library
Anne Wilkens, Wisconsin Public Television

Communications
Chair: Jack Brighton, Illinois Public Media
Casey Davis, WGBH
Karma Foley, Smithsonian Channel
Bailey Smith, PopUp Archive
Jenny Swadosh, New School

There’s a lot of work to do, and we need your help to make this happen. We want to see PBCore in the wild. How do you use PBCore? What challenges do you have? Let us know in the comment section below or by email, and let’s make PBCore better together.

This post was written by Bailey Smith, Co-founder of PopUp Archive and PBCore Communications Team Secretary.

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PBCore at “Describing Moving Images” Workshop

By on September 28, 2011

Yesterday I presented PBCore at a workshop organized by Northeast Historic Film on “Describing Moving Images.” PBCore was just one part of a day filled with FRBR, DACS and authority control discussions. Students were especially interested to learn about cataloging collections in PBCore and how to relate one PBCore record to another.

My slides are available here: NHF_PBCore_WGBH.pdf

My co-presenter’s slides are available here on the web site of Northeast Historic Film.

PS: There’s still time to register for the next PBCore Workshop coming up in November at the Association of Moving Image Archivists conference in Austin, Texas, taught by public media colleagues Jack Brighton, Kara Van Malssen, Dave Rice and Brian Graney.

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