Fellowship Provides Unique Opportunity for Students to Preserve At-Risk Public Media Content

News

San José State University School of Information students living near San Francisco and interested in gaining hands-on experience in digital preservation have the unique opportunity to apply for the Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship for spring 2018. Applications close Nov. 3.

The San José State University School of Information is one of the five partner universities on the Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship developed by the WGBH Educational Foundation to increase audiovisual preservation and education at public broadcasting organizations around the country.

The five partner universities include: San José State University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Missouri, University of Oklahoma, and Clayton State University.

All universities are paired with local public media stations to host fellows who will “inventory, digitize, and catalog small collections of audiovisual media; generate technical and preservation metadata; and process the digital files for ingest into the American Archive of Public Broadcasting,” the Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship overview states.  

According to Alyce Scott, a lecturer at the SJSU iSchool and fellowship advisor, the fellowship provides a unique opportunity for students to gain hands-on experience training in these specialized skills while utilizing local knowledge of their communities to preserve regional public media content. SJSU iSchool fellows will work onsite with the Bay Area Video Coalition and the Center for Asian-American Media, both located in San Francisco.

“The need for educational programs in audiovisual preservation continues to increase, as our window of opportunity to preserve these materials is quickly narrowing. The fellowship program is a broad stride forward in addressing this problem,” Scott said.

Applications are currently being accepted for the fellowship program that runs during the spring 2018 semester. There will be two cohorts with the first scheduled for January through April; a second will run from June through August. The five partner universities will support 10 fellows overall.

Specifically, for SJSU iSchool students, the eligibility requirements include:

  • A 3.0 GPA;
  • Completion of all core classes with a B or higher;
  • Completion of INFO 281, topic Metadata;
  • Completion of INFO 284, topic Digital Curation;
  • All applicants should demonstrate interest in technical areas of the information profession as shown by classes taken or work experience;
  • Ability to attend an immersive meeting in Boston in the first or second week in January 2018 (fully funded).

The deadline for SJSU iSchool students to submit their application is Nov. 3, 2017. To apply, please visit the SJSU iSchool’s PBPF application page.

The Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. To learn additional details about the fellowship, see the Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship overview page.