The Media Bureau of the Federal Communications Commission has announced that starting on January 2, 2025, the public access to the Commission's Centralized Database System (CDBS) will be discontinued. While all broadcast services have been transitioned to the License Management System (LMS), the CDBS Public View service has been retained. CDBS Public View provides users with access to the original versions of applications filed within the system. We have noticed though that the application data in CDBS has been deteriorating. Many of the applications that were once in CDBS are available for view, in a slightly limited form through LMS.
FCCdata has always linked to the CDBS versions of applications that were originally filed in CDBS (those with a file number starting with "B"). CDBS application links also appear in myLPFM and in some toybox tools, such as the Filing Window Tracking Tool.
With the upcoming changes to FCCdata, we will attempt to link to the LMS versions of the legacy CDBS applications based on the application type in the eLMS database. If there is no application that we can cross reference to, the file number on the application history (right side of the screen) will show a file number without a link (similar to those from the Radio History Project). Other impacted REC tools will have a similar experience.
Between December 17 and 22, 2024, we will be working on projects that will change the links in FCCdata and other tools (such as myLPFM) to point to the LMS version of the application instead of the CDBS version. During this time, users may experience outages or functionality issues as we work on making the changes.
We are concerned that some of the historical information from CDBS may be lost forever. We will be making efforts to try to preserve as much of it as we can.
Update 12-21-24 11:30AM
We have made some changes in FCCdata and myLPFM to change links to applications and other resrouces from CDBS to LMS. We have also engaged in an expansive radio history preservation project to retrieve public notice data from CDBS that would be otherwise lost forever from the public view. We will have the details about all of this in our final report once the projects are completed.
As a part of this project, we will be streamlining the method used for gathering and displaying data on pleadings. This includes the elimination of the REC Pleadings Combiner, an internal tool that is used to assure that all CDBS-era and LMS-era pleadings are in one place. We have determined that most of the pleadings that were in CDBS have been given counterparts in LMS.
To accommodate the use of the LMS pleadings data directly instead of through the pleadings combiner, we will need to make changes to the following services:
- FCC.today
- Renewal Delay
- Renewal Status
- Filing Window Application Tracking System (FWATS)
