PBCore_website

What is PBCore? PBCore is a cataloging standard for the description of audiovisual content, a data sharing tool, and much more. Since its development in the early 2000s, dozens of organizations have been using PBCore's comprehensive and flexible features for their archiving needs. - Learn More

Getting Started The PBCore standard is composed of elements, attributes, and controlled vocabularies that make up its powerful descriptive system, or schema. Need a sense of how it works? Start here. - Tutorial: PBCore 101 - Frequently Asked Questions - Sample Records

Who uses PBCore? Louisiana Public Broadcasting, the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, and other organizations have chosen PBCore for its focus on audiovisual content and the ease with which they can share their records. Take a look at how people use PBCore, and find out how it can help you. - Learn More

Accessing Tools and Delving Deep PBCore offers a rich set of features for anyone to use. Once you've familiarized yourself with the basics of PBCore, visit this section to learn precisely how to use the schema for your next project. - Cataloging Tool - Spreadsheet Templates - Other PBCore Tools

What is PBCore?

PBCore is a way to organize information about audiovisual content. PBCore records can easily be shared, allowing information about media assets and collections to be exchanged between organizations and media systems.

Public broadcasting communities in the United States originally developed PBCore so that producers and local stations could better share, manage and preserve their media. Since then, a growing number of moving image archives and media organizations outside of public broadcasting have also adopted PBCore to manage their audiovisual assets and collections.

Key Functions

- A guideline for cataloging or describing audiovisual content (as a content standard) - A model for building custom databases/applications - A guideline for identifying a set of vocabularies for fields describing AV assets - A data model for a configurable collection management system (Omeka, Collective Access, etc.) - An exchange (import or export) mechanism between applications - A guideline for creating inventory spreadsheets

Frequently Asked Questions

Getting Started with PBCore Q: What is PBCore? A: Simply put, PBCore is a way to organize audiovisual content. Public broadcasting communities in the United States originally developed PBCore so that producers and local stations could better share, manage and preserve their media. Since then, a growing number of moving image archives and media organizations outside of public broadcasting have also adopted PBCore to manage their audiovisual assets and collections.

Your organization can use PBCore as: - A content standard for cataloging or describing audiovisual content - A model for building custom databases/applications - A guideline for identifying a set of vocabularies for describing audiovisual assets - A data model for configurable collection management systems such as Omeka, Collective Access, etc. - A guideline for creating inventory spreadsheets

Q: What is PBCore not? A: PBCore is focused on providing a standardized way to describe audiovisual assets and related audiovisual material generally created within a broadcast environment. If you primarily need to describe manuscripts, photographs, or other materials that aren’t audiovisual or related to audiovisual content, PBCore is probably not the right choice for your project. While it is generally designed to manage descriptive and technical metadata, PBCore can be used alongside other standards to capture preservation, process, and additional technical metadata. To address more preservation needs, PBCore encourages the use of other standards through extensions and additions. For example, the American Archive of Public Broadcasting uses PBCore for descriptive and technical metadata , PREMIS for preservation metadata, and reVTMD for process history metadata.

Q: How do I get started with PBCore?

A: Before getting started with PBCore, there are some questions you should ask yourself: What kind of information do I want to capture about my content? What kind of system do I want to capture it in? Do I already have a system for some of the content I want to capture or is there an existing system that I’d like to use? Will I have to build one from scratch? From there, familiarize yourself with the ways that PBCore structures and defines the data that you want to capture. Looking at the element definitions and the sample records is a good start. If you work with programmers or developers on ways to store your data, talk to them and figure out what their needs are and how PBCore can address them.

In practical terms, there are several scenarios where you can use PBCore:

1. You can build or customize your Media Asset Management (MAM) systems to conform to the PBCore standard. Almost all existing Digital Access Management (DAM) and MAM systems have database fields like Title, Subject, and Description, and many will have fields for Creators, Producers, and Contributors. Implementing PBCore in existing systems can be as simple as using existing fields, or using them more extensively. But many systems allow you to customize their fields to conform to a preferred standard. If you are building a system from standards-based tools like MySQL, establishing a foundation based on PBCore makes a lot of sense.

2. You can leave your existing systems as they are, and use PBCore as a standard for aggregating and exchanging metadata between systems. This is typically done by using export and import methods between databases, either as XML or CSV. In this case you would map existing fields in your various databases to the appropriate PBCore elements. Basically, PBCore provides a common language between systems, so you can build your import/export methods around it.

3. You can combine these approaches by leveraging your existing media databases, and building a new “master” catalog containing metadata from all your other systems. In this case, the master catalog can serve as a metadata repository from all your media systems without modifying them or impacting their operation.

4. You can use PBCore to capture and structure data in Excel to catalog a backlog of unidentified assets.

5. If you’re already using a cataloging standard that’s mainly for books or documents but you also need to capture information about audiovisual assets, you can incorporate PBCore as a standard to capture audiovisual metadata.

Ultimately, PBCore can then serve as an exchange mechanism with other systems in public broadcasting such as the American Archive for Public Broadcasting. Many other systems and tools used in online media portals and trusted digital repositories are adopting PBCore as an exchange standard. With the ongoing development of PBCore and harmonization with EBUCore, there will be more opportunities to exchange metadata and content with these systems. By establishing a PBCore-based approach to managing your media assets, you will be ready to easily integrate with other systems.

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.