Can You Tell Me How to Get to ... Sesame Street?

• Position: WHAT'S NEW? - Donation of "Sesame Street" digitized episodes to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a collaboration between the Library of Congress and WGBH Educational Foundation, has announced that Sesame Workshop has donated a collection of digitized episodes from the past 50 years of Sesame Street to be preserved for posterity. Over the next year, nearly 4,500 episodes from the first 49 seasons of the iconic children's television program will be incorporated into the AAPB's extensive archive of public media from across the U.S. The "Sesame Street" collection will be available to view on-site at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, and by appointment at WGBH in Boston.

"'Sesame Street' changed the landscape of children's media at a time when television was viewed as a 'vast wasteland' and transformed a medium that strongly appealed to children into a source for knowledge and social development for our youngest citizens," says Sesame Street cofounder and AAPB Executive Advisory Council Member Lloyd Morrisett, Jr. "I am proud that we are entrusting the American Archive of Public Broadcasting with the task of preserving stories and characters of 'Sesame Street' for future generations."

The "Sesame Street" preservation project comes on the heels of Sesame Workshop's announcement detailing plans to celebrate the show's 50th year of broadcast. Sesame Workshop is the nonprofit education organization behind "Sesame Street." Its first episode aired Nov. 10, 1969.

Among the episodes preserved in the AAPB's "Sesame Street" collection are indelible scenes like the touching "Farewell, Mr. Hooper," in which Big Bird, the program's guileless surrogate for curious children, learns about death and how to cope; Ernie's "Rubber Duckie, You're the One," which made it to the 16th spot on the Billboard top singles chart in 1970; Graver's frantic back and forth in "Near/Far"; Cookie Monster's turn as "Alistair Cookie," the cookie-and classics-obsessed host of...