WGBH's New Building and Video Archive

Not far from the BC campus, the new headquarters of WGBH, Boston's public television/public radio station, opened this week to much fanfare. Much of the attention has focused on the media element of the building itself, a "digital skin" presenting changing LED images over the cars on the Massachusetts Turnpike passing beneath it.

(See "Three new buildings about communication are also designed to communicate" for more on the WGBH headquarters and two other communication-related buildings all designed by the same architectural firm.)

WGBH has also introduced the WGBH OpenVault, a selection of streaming video clips and interview transcripts from several of the station's current and past programs.

Designed to encourage educators and scholars in higher education to incorporate these materials into classroom curricula and outside study [says 'GBH in a press release], Open Vault includes over 500 streaming video clips and more than 1,000 interviews....

Among the programs drawn from for the OpenVault are:

• *New Television Workshop, an experimental video art series on the air from1974 to 1993
• *Say Brother (now Basic Black), an African American public affairs series with programs from 1968 to 1982
• *the Ten O’Clock News, a Boston-based nightly news program including stories on the African American community and busing from 1974 through1991
• *interviews from two WGBH series, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, originally broadcast in 1989, andVietnam, A Television History, first presented in 1983