Sunday Sounds: Preserving the Radio Ministry of Brooklyn’s Bethany Baptist Church

Abstract

This article discusses the importance of preserving radio broadcasts from traditionally under-documented groups, in this case the Sunday sermons from an African American Baptist church in Brooklyn – Bethany Baptist Church. The history of the collection and how it ended up at Brooklyn College are reviewed, as are the steps the archives took in order to make digitizing the collection a reality.

Keywords:

• Radio broadcast
• sermon
• Brooklyn
• Black Church
• digitization

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Jennifer Jones Austin, Natalie Jones, Kojo Davis, and Professor Lynda Day for their assistance in explaining The Bethany Hour and how it arrived at Brooklyn College.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 F. Gerald Ham, “The Archival Edge,” The American Archivist 38 (January 1975): 5–6.

2 Ham, p. 8.

3 Jessica Wagner Webster, “Filling the Gaps: Oral Histories and Underdocumented Populations in the American Archivist, 1938–2011,” The American Archivist 79 (Fall/Winter 2016): 274.

4 Jay Gaidmore, et al., “The Voice of Virginia: The WRVA Sound Collection Preservation Project,” ARSC Journal 36 no. 2 (Fall 2005): 207.

5 Maureen Russell, “Thousand Oaks Library, Grant R. Brimhall Library, Special Collections, American Radio Archives, Thousand Oaks, California,” Music Reference Services Quarterly 20 (2017): 111–17.

6 African American History Digital Library; American Theological Library Association (ATLA) Religion Database; Indiana University, Archives of African American Music and Culture, Black Radio Collections; Library of Congress; National Archives; National Museum of African American Culture; New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; New York Public Radio (WNYC) Archives; Pacifica Radio Archive; Paley Center for Media, New York City; Smithsonian Institution; SoundTheology.org; U.C. Santa Barbara Library’s Discography of American Historical Recordings; Umbra Search database of African American History.

7 Marilyn Mellowes, “The Black Church.”

8 Professor Lynda Day, email to author, January 29, 2020.

9 Jennifer Jones Austin, email to author, December 20, 2019.

10 Kojo Davis, interview with author, January 7, 2020.

11 The International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) has published a statement of Ethical Principles for Sound and Audiovisual Archives (https://www.iasa-web.org/ethical-principles), which address the three major areas of activity for sound and audiovisual archives: collection building and management, preservation, and dissemination (accessed April 6, 2020).

12 ATLA Digital Library Metadata Guidelines & Best Practices: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YeKjJqskmL-0GFuieFhp9Qq7Wwp4_7sv3kwvEO2xOWE/edit (accessed April 7, 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Council on Library and Information Resources Recordings-at-Risk program under Grant RAR_006_000529.

Notes on contributors

Colleen Bradley-Sanders

Colleen Bradley-Sanders is an Associate Professor and the College Archivist at Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY. A Peace Corps veteran, she earned her MLIS and an MA in Archives Administration at the University of South Carolina. Her 25 years of archival experience come from positions with History Colorado, the New York University Health Sciences Library, and Southern Methodist University’s Bridwell School of Theology Library. She completed the SAA Digital Archives Specialist certification process in 2014, and arrived in Brooklyn in 2015. At Brooklyn College, she has focused on reducing the backlog of unprocessed collections, and expanding access to, and use of, the collections through digitization projects and collaborations with faculty to engage their students with primary source materials.