Obtaining Your Organization's Metadata

You may easily obtain a copy of the records that describe the moving image and sound assets submitted to the AAPB by your organization through the Archival Management System (AMS). There are two formats available for record export: a limited CSV or PBCore XML.

Limited CSVs

A limited CSV exported from the AMS provides a basic inventory list of your records. You can also open this in another application that supports CSV, such as OpenOffice, or upload it into GoogleDocs.

The inventory list includes the following six columns:

AAPB GUID: The unique identifier used for the record in the AAPB collection.

Unique ID: The local identifier(s) your organization submitted for the asset.

Title: The title(s) of the asset. If an asset has multiple titles, these will be separated by a pipe character, which looks like this: |.

Format: The physical or digital format of the original inventory record submitted to the collection.

Duration: The duration of the content on the physical or digital format from the original inventory record submitted to the collection.

Priority: The nomination status of the asset, denoting its level of priority in the digitization process.

To export a limited CSV, you will need to be logged into the AMS. From the Records page, you should see all of your organization’s records.

Click on the Instantiations tabs on the top left of the Records page. Then, click the Operation button, and select Limited CSV from the drop-down menu. When the dialog box appears asking if you’d like to export records, click Yes. Your limited CSV will then be emailed, and you may open it as an Excel spreadsheet or another application that supports CSV such as OpenOffice or GoogleDocs.

PBCore XML

For single records, cleaned and normalized PBCore can be obtained by adding ".pbcore" to any AAPB url. For example: https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip_37-95j9krh1.pbcore

The original, unnormalized PBCore is available from the AMS. PBCore XML records can be emailed to you as a zip file containing folders titled by each record’s AAPB GUID.

To export PBCore XML, you will need to be logged into the AMS. From the records page, you should see all of your organization’s records.

Make sure that the Assets tab is highlighted in blue in the top left of the Records page. Click the Operation button and select Export Results from the drop-down menu. When the dialog box appears asking to export records, click Yes. An email with a link to download your PBCore XML files will be sent. The email may take some time to arrive, depending on the number of records requested.

When the email arrives, click the link to download records. Un-zip the folder using software compatible with your system, such as WinZip or UnRAR. In the directory named “data” there will be one sub-directory for each of your organization’s assets, and each will be titled with the AAPB GUID of the asset. Within each folder, there will be a PBCore XML file. If the asset has been digitized, there also will be a PREMIS XML file, which includes migration metadata.

If you have any questions contact the AAPB Project Manager at aapb_notifications@wgbh.org.