This is the first post in a series about the PBCore webinar that the Education Team presented in October 2014. A recording of the webinar can be found here, and we’ll be recapping the event over the next few weeks. The webinar began with a brief history of PBCore, which is outlined here.
PBCore began in 2001 with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The PBCore metadata schema was created for U.S. public broadcasting community for use by anyone managing A/V assets, such as:
– Librarians
– Archivists
– Independent producers
– Broadcasters
Today, the PBCore XML schema is also used as a general data model for audiovisual collections.
The very first version of the PBCore XML schema — version 1.0 — was released in April 2005. Developed as a derivative of the Dublin Core metadata standard, it contained 48 metadata elements intended to describe a media asset or resource’s intellectual content, creation, creators, usage, permissions, constraints, use obligations, and its form or format.
In January 2007, v1.1 of PBCore introduced nesting into the schema. By August 2010, v1.3 offered 62 elements organized into 15 containers and 4 sub-containers. Then, a significant overhaul was completed, and version 2.0 of PBCore was released in November 2011.
In 2014, the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, an initiative managed by WGBH and the Library of Congress, took charge of further developments to PBCore. Since 2014, over 50 members from the audiovisual asset management community have been actively working as members of the PBCore Advisory Subcommittee of the Cataloging and Metadata Committee of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. These teams (Communications, Documentation, Education, Schema, and Website) are charged with reassessing the PBCore schema, continuing outreach to PBCore users and potential adopters, creating resources for the PBCore community, and improving the PBCore website. They engage in activities such as revising and documenting the PBCore schema (version 2.1 is schedule for release in summer 2015), ongoing surveying of the A/V community, and preparing and leading webinars, conference presentations, blog posts about PBCore and best practices for describing and organizing audiovisual assets.
In 2015, as a precursor to the Code4Lib conference in Portland, Oregon, members of the PBCore Subcommittee and the AAPB met with representatives from EBUCore, a widely adopted European audiovisual metadata schema, to plan for future collaborations between the two standards (more on that coming soon!)
