Lead Partner: Educational Broadcasting Corporation (EBC)(13/WNET-TV New York)
Additional Partners: New York University, Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program; Public Broadcasting Service; WGBH, Boston

Public television's rich legacy documents America’s social history through programming not offered by commercial television. Programs like "Nature", "NOVA", and "Frontline" are only produced digitally, often in high-definition (HD). Digitally produced public television programs are at great risk of being lost because rapid changes in technology make new video formats and equipment obsolete quickly. Saving these digital programs today will ensure they live far into the future.

Objectives:

• Design an archive for the long-term preservation of today’s public television programs.
• Determine a suitable video "wrapper" to bundle and preserve the connections between metadata (data that provides information about what was recorded) and programs so the programs can be retrieved later and played back.
• Inventory, appraise, and select collections of public television programs to use as test data to develop best practices for preservation.

More detailed project information can be found at the Project Web site (external link)

Highlights

• Paper: Intellectual Property and Copyright Issues Relating to the Preservation and Future Accessibility of Digital Public Television Programs (external link), 04/11 (PDF, 405KB)
• Paper: A Preservation-Compliant Media Asset Management System for Television Production (external link), 4/27/11 (PDF, 1.39MB)
• Paper: Preserving Digital Public Television Final Report, June 2010 (PDF, 3.62MB)
• Paper: Strategies for Sustainable Preservation of Born Digital Public Television (external link) (PDF, 2.75MB)
• Paper: Preserving Digital Public Television: Is There Life After Broadcasting? (external link), published in International Preservation News, No. 47, May 2009 (PDF, 1.50MB)
• Presentation: Content transfer: Getting data moved around the network (Presented at 2008 DLF Fall Forum) (PDF, 133.4KB)
• Paper: Survey of Digital Formatting Practices In Public Television Program Production (2007) (PDF, 72KB)
• Paper: Recommended Appraisal Guidelines For Selecting Born-Digital Master Programs for Preservation and Deposit with the Library of Congress (2006) (external link) (PDF, 463KB)
• Paper: Best Practices Survey (Draft 1) (2005) (external link) (PDF, 102KB)
• " . . . from the Archives." (external link) Examples of historic PBS television programs from the 1970s to the present.
• Interview with Nan Rubin, the principal investigator of the PDPT project.
• Howard Besser of the PDPT project is a digital preservation pioneer.