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The Benefits of PBCore

Q: How can PBCore benefit my archive description and program goals?
A: PBCore was created by members of the broadcast and audiovisual archiving communities to meet the descriptive needs of audiovisual materials. If you don’t currently have a satisfactory, standardized way to store information about your content, PBCore can help ensure that you are capturing and keeping the data in a consistent and straightforward way. Stations throughout the public media system use different databases and tools to manage media and metadata such as traffic systems, playout servers, asset management systems, and tape logs. PBCore provides a way to aggregate and normalize metadata from those different systems to make everything findable, shareable, and reusable across different platforms. In many cases, stations also have many media assets for which little information exists. Think of tapes stored in desk drawers, or that USB hard drive full of digital media files. Many of these assets are valuable and deserve to be cataloged, and you may not know their full value until years later. A simple PBCore database can record and organize information about these assets and make them findable.

Q: Does it cost anything to adopt PBCore?
A: As an open standard, PBCore is free to use for anyone. For more information, see the Creative Commons licensing information on the Credits and License page.

Q: What kind of time, staff, or training do I need?
A: Depending on your familiarity with metadata concepts and standards, adopting PBCore may require an investment of learning time. You might also need to develop tools, or customize your existing tools, to adopt PBCore into your media workflow. To build a PBCore-based media catalog, you can use inexpensive software like FileMaker, Access, or MySQL. You will very likely shorten any learning curve, and discover existing PBCore tools, by reaching out to the PBCore team at pbcoreinfo@wgbh.org

Q: How will this pay off in the long term?
A:
- Your investment of time will pay off as you develop your PBCore–based media catalog
or metadata system.

- You’ll save time and resources by not developing your own schema.

- Your media assets will be findable, reusable, and shareable to whatever extent you want them to be. Your collection will be able to interoperate with a growing number of other media software systems and archives, including the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.