PBCore Development and Training Project

In 2016, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded WGBH a Preservation and Access Research and Development grant to pursue the PBCore Development and Training Project. Short for “Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary,” PBCore is a metadata schema – a standard for organizing information – for the management of public media and audiovisual collections in the United States.

WGBH will use the grant funds to develop tools, methodologies and training workshops to make PBCore more accessible to archivists and public media organizations over the course of this 27-month project.

WGBH’s Media Library and Archives (MLA) has been responsible for the ongoing development of PBCore since 2013, when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) selected WGBH and the Library of Congress as the permanent stewards of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB).

The grant award will fund a number of initiatives designed to enhance PBCore’s accessibility among archivists, public media organizations, and archival educators. Deliverables for the project will include:

a new widely available open-source PBCore cataloging tool
improvements and updates to existing PBCore tools
metadata crosswalks and sample integrations with a number of commonly-used metadata standards
updated PBCore-based Excel templates, sample records, and use cases that expand upon existing guidelines and put them in plain language for non-archivists
updates to the PBCore website that incorporate the new tools and documentation in an accessible and user-friendly manner
a set of free webinars explaining the use of the new tools
a printable PDF manual collecting all PBCore documentation and cataloging guidelines
PBCore user training workshops held at major conferences
two fully-funded PBCore train-the-trainer workshops which will fund public media professionals and archival educators to learn about training others in PBCore

For more information about PBCore, visit http://pbcore.org.