WGBH, a self-described public media "powerhouse" that serves New England and beyond with award-winning public radio, web, and television programming recently opened up their archive and put thousands of digital photos, video and audio clips online at Open Vault.
The riches here are staggering. For example, take this Nixon chestnut where he says "There is no question now as to the outcome in Vietnam. The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong are not going to succeed. The only question now is one of time, and what happens after the military phase." In fact, the site is particularly rich in Vietnam War materials, which they have highlighted in their Vietnam Collection. In a number of cases, a searchable transcript is available.
It’s also interesting to look at their technical decisions. They built it using a pile of open source applications, from MySQL and Solr to Blacklight and a number of other apps in between. Chris Beer of the WGBH Library gave a presentation at the last Code4Lib Conference on the project. His slides are available now and a video should be up later (the diagram is from his slides). They also use Flowplayer for video streaming.
Altogether a great project that is making a ton of really fascinating and useful content available online for free.
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Roy, when I think of WGBH I think immediately of Julia Child. By discovering and developing Child’s television potential, WGBH really started the whole major industry of cooking and food shows. It’s interesting that public television is often cricitized as a waste of taxpayer money, but in this instance a local public television station created a billion dollar industry. Without Julia Child there would be no Martha Stewart, et.al.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by JMS and valerie forrestal, SC Williams Library. SC Williams Library said: WGBH Opens Their Vault [via Tennant: Digitial Libraries] http://bit.ly/c7VEdR [...]
[...] Also Added a Link To Roy Tennant’s Column About Open Vault that Was Published in [...]