Transcribe Classic WGBH Programs

Reading Time: 2 minutes

From Leah Weisse

Dear ‘GBH Alumni,

My name is Leah Weisse, Production Archival Compliance Manager at the WGBH Media Library and Archives (MLA). The MLA team would like to invite you to help preserve WGBH’s collection by participating in the Transcribe to Digitize Challenge hosted by the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB)!

Spend some time correcting interviews from Say Brother, or panel discussions with Louis Lyons, or news segments from Ten O’Clock News. Once we reach our goal of 20+ completed transcripts, AAPB will add the completed transcripts to the AAPB website for public accessibility.

We have 2 months left to complete the challenge to receive free digitization of tapes for an equivalent number of corrected transcripts.

We have completed 43 transcripts and the maximum we can achieve is 100. LPB, RMPBS and WPT are all ahead of us!

Here is a link to access WGBH’s transcripts in FIX IT+.

To find a transcript to correct, scroll down to the transcripts that do not have “Completed” at the top of the image.

Please share with your family and friends! Everyone’s participation will aid in preserving WGBH’s original programming, making it highly discoverable to researchers, educators, students, lifelong learners, journalists, and the public!

Thank you!

From the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB)

AAPB has digitized and preserved more than 50,000 hours of public television and radio programming created by stations and producers across the United States. This unique historic material, created as early as the 1940s and often lacking closed captioning, represents our shared and diverse cultural heritage. Yet it is not highly discoverable to researchers, educators, students, lifelong learners, journalists and the public because it lacks robust descriptive information, or “metadata.”

With funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the AAPB has made strides at making the collection more discoverable by creating speech-to-text transcripts of the audio and video in the collection. These transcripts can be used to improve accessibility of the collection through the addition of new keywords and by exposing the time-stamped transcript alongside the media player on the AAPB website. However, these computer-generated transcripts lack accuracy, and the AAPB is seeking the help of the public to correct them!

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