Project News from WGBH
by Courtney Michael WGBH Media Library & Archives
The Boston Local TV News Project is humming along thanks to an army of interns from the Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science and a great group of partners and collaborators.
As of this posting, we have already said goodbye to one "batch" of interns and currently have four more working on the project. Their main task right now is to transcribe 30 drawers full of index cards which describe the WHDH collection held by the Boston Public Library. Thanks to the Internet Archive, images of the cards are now available online. Of an estimated 30,000 index cards, they have made their way through 9,000 already - which means we're almost 1/3 of the way done! Along the way, they are stopping periodically to research some of the more interesting or curious subject headings and finding great stories from our local Boston history. These investigations result in regular postings on this very blog.<!--more read more...-->
In addition to the intern work, Karen Colbron and Lindsay Whitacre from the WGBH Media Library and Archives are working closely with Northeast Historic Film to bring in the assignment sheets from the WCVB collection for scanning and transcription. Unlike the subject oriented WHDH card catalog - an attempt by someone at WHDH to organize the collection for re-use - the WCVB "assignment sheets" are a bit more "raw" or "close to the source." Assignment sheets were essentially logs written up by camera staff, describing the footage they shot on a particular day.
One of the challenges we face as a project is to bring all of these disparate sources of data and description into one catalog. Each collection has different access points and levels of metadata. The one thing most of them have in common are dates. Because the collections overlap in dates, we expect to find that records from one collection inform another and vice versa, allowing us to build a more robust catalog description of a particular day and a particular news story across the four collections.
Estimated date overlap across the four collections: 
