How the Library of Congress is using both AI and volunteers to unlock public broadcasting history - Nextgov/FCW
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Draft executive order would set deadlines for digital signature and key quantum encryption
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Federal agencies are rushing into AI without cleaning house first
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By
John Breeden II
By
John Breeden II
May 22, 2026 05:42 PM ET
The FixIt+ platform uses AI-generated transcripts as a starting point, then relies on volunteers to refine them so historic public media becomes easier to search, study and understand.
Artificial Intelligence
IT Modernization
Public broadcasting has a long history of capturing important moments in American life. It preserved voices from the civil rights movement, debates over war and foreign policy, regional arts coverage and local public affairs programs that reflected the people and places shaping the nation. But many of those moments have also been hard to find, buried in tape vaults, archives and library collections that few people would ever be able to search or even really know about.<br>That is part of what makes the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) so interesting. A collaboration between GBH, which is the Boston public media organization formerly known as WGBH, and the Library of Congress, the archive is working to make historic public media more searchable and accessible, in part by using AI-generated transcripts as a starting point.<br>The public-facing correction layer for that effort is called FixIt+, a volunteer platform where people can review and refine machine-generated transcripts from older radio and television programs. As AAPB Archives Outreach Manager Meghan Sorensen explained in an interview published by the Library of Congress, “FixIt+ is a volunteer transcript correction platform and open-source project maintained by our team at GBH for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. Its mission is to make historic public media more accessible by inviting the public to help update and correct computer-generated transcripts in a way that feels easy and engaging.”<br>That approach makes a lot of sense. I work with transcripts fairly often myself. When I am covering an important speech, a major announcement or a policy presentation, I will often check the transcript as I listen so I can catch words or details that went by too quickly. For modern events, AI-generated transcripts are usually pretty good. Even so, they still stumble in predictable ways. Laughter, coughing and side comments can confuse them, and they sometimes force nonverbal sounds into words that were never spoken.<br>That problem becomes much more obvious when the recordings are older. In trying out and working with FixIt+, I spent time with broadcasts from the 1960s and 1970s, and the limitations were easy to hear. The audio may have been broadcast quality for its time, but by modern standards it can sound thin, noisy or compressed. Regional...