On October 23, 2014, the AMIA PBCore Advisory Subcommittee’s Education Team offered a webinar titled “PBCore: A How-to and Why-to Webinar.” Geared toward archivists, librarians, and anyone who has audiovisual collections at their institutions, the presenters offered contextual background; explained the benefits and reasons why PBCore is perfectly suited for managing audiovisual collections; offered step-by-step guidance on inventorying av assets and getting started with PBCore; and described the use of PBCore in different settings, such as asset management, digital preservation, archival description, and use with other schemas such as PREMIS and METS.
Before we got started, I failed to mention why the PBCore Advisory Subcommittee felt it was important to host this webinar. PBCore is already pretty well established within the moving image and audio archival community, but not so much across the archival profession in general. Why? I think it’s because archivists have only recently realized that we are facing an imminent loss of our audiovisual cultural heritage if we don’t take steps to preserve these collections in the next 10-15 years. And for many years, institutions have not dealt with their audiovisual collections, often because these collections represent only a small part of the overall collection; because av collections are more expensive to preserve and manage; and because there aren’t enough people skilled in audiovisual preservation.
The PBCore Advisory Subcommittee is encouraged by the recent invigoration among archivists who are beginning to deal with their deteriorating av collections, as well as the digital video and audio collections, and we know that PBCore has a place in these efforts. PBCore is uniquely suited to provide a standard way for archivists to record metadata about their av collections.
We look forward to providing more opportunities like yesterday’s webinar in the future, as well as improving the schema over the next few months, clarifying and improving documentation, creating our new website, and generating new PBCore resources.
Many thanks to all of those who attended yesterday’s webinar, and if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to the presenters whose email addresses I have listed below:
Casey E. Davis, WGBH | casey_davis [at] wgbh [dot] org
Maureen McCormick Harlow, PBS | mmharlow [at] pbs [dot] org
Sadie Roosa, WGBH | sadie_roosa [at] wgbh [dot] org
Morgan Oscar Morel | moran.morel [at] georgeblood [dot] com
Enjoy the recording and please feel free to share it among your colleagues and networks!
(The chat text is best readable when the video is viewed in full-screen.)
PBCore: A How-to and Why-to Webinar | Recording from 10/23/14 from American Archive on Vimeo.
This post was written by Casey E. Davis, Project Manager for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting at WGBH and Chair of the AMIA PBCore Advisory Subcommittee.
