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Featured site: WGBH Open Vault
Open Vault is one of my favorite new additions to the the open content library. It represents the opening of a vast resource of clips from Boston’s flagship public television station, WGBH. Simply making this material freely available is a service in itself–it runs the gamut from recordings of poets reading their work to interviews of participants in the Cuban Missile Crisis and Civil Rights Movement.
WGBH, however, went above and beyond by offering the content in a site that is well-designed, easy to use, and offers a nice set of annotation tools to help you organize and tag the content. The videos can be browsed by topic, keyword search, and a visual navigation “mosaic,” all of which manage to be complementary rather than confusing. I sincerely hope that WGBH will inspire other public broadcasters to begin opening up their back catalogs as well.
