Introduction: The State of Radio Preservation

Mapping the radio preservation movement

As every archivist knows, what is nearest to us is most often taken for granted and least likely to be preserved in any proactive and systematic fashion. Radio’s historical ubiquity has, in this sense, also historically been its curse. Radio broadcasting first took off in Europe and North America during the 1920s, heralded as a medium whose impact on modern life would transform everything from popular music and speaking styles to politics and public education. By the 1930s, radio had already taken its place alongside newspapers and cinema as one of the world’s leading sources of public news and entertainment. While other media have since stolen the spotlight – from television’s swift ascendance in the late 1940s and 1950s to the Internet’s rapid expansion in the 1990s and 2000s – radio’s popularity has persisted throughout the past century, and terrestrial radio continues to boast larger audiences than any other medium.¹ Recent decades have also witnessed a steady stream of new distribution platforms for radio and audio programing, from satellite and internet radio to podcasting and other streaming services, extending the reach of radio and its various progeny further than ever before. Yet, for much of its existence, radio’s seemingly constant presence also yielded a comparative complacency in preservation circles, with archivists remaining largely silent on the need to systematically preserve this medium and proactively document its shifting roles in public life.

As the contributors to this special issue show, this situation is happily changing, with great strides made in the field of radio preservation over the past decade. While state broadcasting systems have often benefited from central, federally maintained archives, materials for private broadcasting systems were historically maintained by their originating stations or networks, and few collection stewards gave serious thought to preservation until the dawn of the television era raised questions about the ultimate fate of the decades of radio content that preceded it. In the United States, a scramble by commercial networks seeking to define their broadcast legacies yielded initial radio deposits at institutions such as the Library of Congress, Wisconsin Historical Society, Museum of Broadcast Communications, and the present-day Paley Center.² Despite inclusion of a preservation mandate in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 and authorization of off-air recording by the Library of Congress under the American Television and Radio Archives Act of 1976, it is only recently that radio preservation moved front and center on the national stage.³ The past decade has seen the rise of both the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, which has preserved thousands of hours of radio programing created by public radio stations throughout the United States, and the Library of Congress’s Radio Preservation Task Force, a unit of the National Recording Preservation Board, which has facilitated radio preservation efforts for archiving institutions of all types.⁴ Federal funding agencies have also shown growing interest in supporting radio preservation projects, including the National Recording Preservation Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Council on Library and Information Resources, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services, which have all funded preservation of radio broadcasts by a wide range of content creators and collection custodians.⁵

While this special issue of the Journal of Archival Organization is focused primarily on activities pursued by archiving institutions and preservation groups within the United States, the radio preservation movement has an increasingly global reach. National preservation efforts such as the British Library’s Save Our Sounds Project have emerged alongside international collectives such as the Ibero-American Network of Digital Preservation of Sound and Audiovisual Archives.⁶ Preservation of radio recordings is now taught alongside moving image preservation in professional degree programs across Europe and North America. Radio preservation has also been repeatedly foregrounded in workshops and panels at recent conferences for international professional organizations ranging from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections and Society for American Archivists to the Orphan Film Symposium, Association for Moving Image Archivists, and International Association for Sound and Moving Image Archives. And, UNESCO now honors radio’s value as an internationally recognized form of cultural heritage through its World Radio Day, held annually since 2012.⁷ This growing global recognition of radio’s cultural and historical value has provided an important impetus for preservation efforts, and has also spurred archivists to look beyond the bounds of mainstream, hegemonic programing content and recognize the wide range of broadcasting activities pursued throughout radio’s long history – as a medium that has helped build national publics but also provided a vital source of information and important mouthpiece for diverse communities at the local, regional, and transnational levels.

In assembling this special issue, we have attempted to capture some of the energy and scope of the current radio preservation movement. The articles and projects presented here encourage us to reflect on four broader components of radio preservation work. First, they show us who is doing the work of radio preservation, including the many different types of organizations and people involved in these efforts. Second, they explore what materials are being preserved, at the levels of both information carriers and informational content. Third, they demonstrate who is being served by radio preservation projects, in terms of the communities of users targeted and the interests and uses to which different collections and collecting institutions cater. Finally, they examine how preserved materials are made discoverable and accessible, as not merely passively held collections but instead materials actively used and enjoyed by their intended publics.

Radio collections, as our authors demonstrate, are not confined to specialized media archives, but rather exist as part of a wide range of organizations with varying missions and resources ranging from international broadcast networks and individual commercial or nonprofit stations to university archives, local historical museums, and loosely knit groups of private collectors and radio enthusiasts. These diverse institutions are staffed by professionals, paraprofessionals, and volunteers whose training and interests in radio preservation vary considerably from one institutional context to the next. Our authors address the specific needs and challenges of operating within these different contexts and show how respective sets of institutional pressures and considerations shape their resulting preservation strategies.

For materials preserved, our authors highlight a range of programing content on a variety of media formats. The collections they discuss include government-funded international political broadcasts, domestic entertainment carried by mainstream commercial networks, educational radio, locally produced content by and for members of traditionally underrepresented groups, materials held by dispersed networks of private collectors, and podcasts produced by independent content creators. Addressing what content they privilege for preservation and why, our authors also highlight issues surrounding radio’s rapidly deteriorating information carriers – from recordings on fragile lacquer transcription discs and decaying magnetic tape to equally vulnerable born-digital content housed on everything from third-party network servers to personal laptops and external hard drives. However, as many of our authors additionally note, radio collections are rarely just recorded sound collections but instead part of hybrid collections that often include large volumes of paper documents and other records, which provide important contextualizing information and must be systematically processed and managed alongside the recordings themselves.

Just as radio's public audiences have been historically broad and varied, the diverse communities served by today’s radio collecting institutions have many different interests and needs. Users discussed by our authors range from university scholars and college students pursuing academic research to elementary school children doing class projects on local and national events, radio station staff seeking materials in programing libraries, fans of old-time radio comedy and drama programs, communities of technical enthusiasts seeking long-distance listening records, podcasters searching content for use in new episodes, and members of the general public pursuing online news or entertainment. As our authors elaborate, a solid understanding of the different information-seeking behaviors and needs of these diverse user communities is vital for supporting increased discoverability and more meaningful engagement with radio collections.

The inherent instability of recorded sound carriers and the lack of easily discernible information about their contents present numerous challenges to discoverability and accessibility of radio recordings. The contents of audiovisual recordings are frequently unknown prior to physical playback, making collection or verification of metadata more difficult than for other kinds of archival materials. However, the simple act of playing back a recording can also risk irreparable damage to fragile carrier media and requires professional skills and knowledge that are often in as short supply as the aging and obsolete playback equipment itself. For these reasons, as our authors elaborate, preservation and access projects often include digitization of recordings to prolong their lifespan, enable accurate metadata collection, and make them more discoverable and accessible to their intended users. However, digitization is a costly process, and making digitized content accessible online presents its own problems, from legal obstacles to development and maintenance of adequate digital infrastructures. Our authors describe a range of strategies for dealing with these issues – from crowdsourced cataloging solutions and use of new speech-to-text software to institutional partnerships aimed at facilitating sustainable digital access solutions.

Issue contents

In arranging this issue, we have structured contributions around a series of core issues, tasks, and goals driving current work within the radio preservation field. These include the need for coordinated agendas; increasing diversity and equity within the profession; diversifying the range of content prioritized for acquisition and preservation, with particular attention to historically underrepresented communities; exploring preservation practices within nontraditional archiving spaces; cultivating new preservation and access solutions through institutional and transnational partnerships; embracing new preservation technologies and developing sustainable digital infrastructures; working directly with content creators to facilitate preservation work and promote increased access and discoverability; and mobilizing broader communities of cultural stakeholders to accomplish these ambitious goals.

Coordinating preservation agendas

Defining a sense of shared problems, principles, and purpose is important for any profession. In an opening editorial, David Seubert from University of California, Santa Barbara’s Davidson Library pushes for establishing more coordinated priorities and agendas for radio preservation. Seubert, who curates his institution’s recorded sound collections, has served as president of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, and is an appointed member of the Library of Congress’s National Recording Preservation Board, begins by noting the significant strides made in radio preservation in recent years, but also observes several lingering challenges. Moving forward, he argues, the large volume and diversity of extant radio materials produced over the course of the past century demand strategic appraisal decisions, while the dispersed nature of radio collections requires a coordinated national effort and increased levels of institutional support. Noting the unique challenges of preserving radio’s physical formats compared to other archival materials, Seubert also critiques what he considers to be outdated intellectual property laws that impede efforts to effectively manage these materials and make them accessible to their intended users. These are central concerns for many of our subsequent contributors, who discuss their own strategies and solutions in hopes of promoting dialogue with and providing models for other archivists.

Expanding access to preservation training and diversifying archival education

The specialized demands of archival radio recordings present problems not just for the physical media themselves but also for professional training. As Casey Davis Kaufman, James Elmborg, Rebecca Fraimow, Teague Schneiter, and Moriah Ulinskas discuss in their article, training in audiovisual preservation has traditionally been restricted to university degree programs concentrated on the East and West Coasts, and limitations in educational access have perpetuated longstanding equity and diversity problems in audiovisual archiving. Exploring possible solutions to these issues, the authors discuss the Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship, pursued by the American Archive of Public Broadcasting in partnership with the University of Alabama and other regional colleges to help open educational access, then highlight recent efforts by the National Film Preservation Board and Association of Moving Image Archivists to address diversity issues through a national diversity, equity, and inclusion report and further scholarship opportunities.

Preserving public media collections in university archives

While attention in radio preservation has traditionally focused on collections maintained by larger national and state archives, as Erik A. Moore and Rebecca Toov discuss in their article, public universities were some of the first broadcasters in the United States, and records of these stations often continue to be maintained by their respective university archives. Addressing a grant-funded project they pursued to process materials in their archives for University of Minnesota station KUOM, the authors advocate for a holistic approach that includes processing of paper records alongside the recordings themselves. Descriptive metadata gleaned from the paper records, they argue, combined with technical metadata from the physical recordings, can help remove much of the guesswork involved in appraising recorded sound collections and provide a clearer guide for digitization priorities. As the authors elaborate, improved collection discoverability and online access have also been important for their project, with the strategies pursued giving their formerly unknown collection a broader national reach and opening the door for participation in larger, cross-institutional grant initiatives.

Preserving programming by and for historically underrepresented groups

University archives are not limited to records of their institutions’ own history but also frequently include collections documenting the local communities they serve. For her article, archivist Colleen Bradley-Sanders at Brooklyn College discusses her institution’s acquisition and preservation of a collection from Reverend William A. Jones, Jr., an activist pastor of Brooklyn’s African American Bethany Baptist Church whose long-running Bethany Hour radio program was distributed in syndication to independent stations during the Civil Rights Era. While her institution recognized the collection’s historical value and benefited from local connections during the acquisition process, limited campus resources and a lack of specialized training among archives staff created significant obstacles to effectively managing these materials. As Bradley-Sanders discusses, while her institution successfully secured external grant money for additional staff and third-party digitization services to ensure adequate preservation of and access to their collections, local radio recordings held by other city colleges and universities often remain inaccessible, at risk, and undervalued by collection stewards and preservation funding agencies.

Surveying preservation practices at commercial and nonprofit stations

Another often-neglected source of radio collections is radio broadcasters themselves, with many radio stations maintaining vast programing libraries that include a variety of locally produced content. As Michael Falcone, Brian Real, and Yan Quan Liu discuss in their article, the large number and geographical dispersion of station-owned collections, in combination with increasingly consolidated structures of media ownership, create significant challenges for assessing the overall state of station archives and the needs of station archivists. To gain a better understanding of these collections, the authors conducted a preliminary survey of twenty-seven commercial and nonprofit stations. Their findings suggest that station-held collections often lack active stewardship, and in cases where collections are actively managed, staff lack the professional training or resources needed to ensure effective preservation of or access to materials in their care. While broadcast stations are often neglected areas of focus for information professionals and radio preservation initiatives, the authors suggest that concerted interventions are needed to protect these materials from permanent loss.

Creating access initiatives through local partnerships

Partnerships with external organizations offer one solution to the problem of managing individual station collections. Chicago’s Studs Terkel Radio Archives (STRA) offers one such model. As information scholar Stacy T. Kowalcyzk and STRA archivist Allison Schein Holmes elaborate in their article, the STRA was created through the joint effort of Chicago History Museum and radio host Studs Terkel’s home station WFMU. Together, they have pursued a series of collaborative metadata and access initiatives for their collections. Through crowdsourced funding and federal grant monies, the STRA has digitized decades of Terkel’s interviews. Employing speech-to-text software to generate automated transcriptions of these interviews, the archives has developed an online remixing tool that allows users to edit, combine, and share these interviews for educational purposes, with pilot outreach and engagement programs being pursued with public libraries and local high schools. As the authors note, their project has proven resource-intensive and they have faced numerous challenges ranging from navigating copyright permissions to staffing and technical support, but this collaborative venture has also enabled novel uses of and access to their collections beyond what partner institutions could achieve on their own.

Cultivating transnational preservation strategies

While radio has historically served as a powerful tool for nation building, it is also a global medium whose signals inherently move across national borders and whose content is channeled through complex networks of transnational distribution and consumption. As Brandon Burke and Tanya Yule from the Hoover Institution Library and Archives (HILA) elaborate in their article, this transnational scope is particularly evident for services such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. These US-backed broadcasting initiatives were developed during the Cold War to provide audiences behind the Iron Curtain with Western perspectives on current events, coordinating their operations across multiple foreign bureaus to distribute local versions of broadcasts in over two dozen languages. While HILA holds a large collection of RFE/RL materials, the authors show how effective processing has required close collaboration with international archives holding complementary collections. As the authors explain, transnational collaboration poses many challenges, requiring delicate negotiations to resolve incongruities with archives’ respective metadata systems and preservation workflows. But resulting gains in information and streamlining of digitization and description processes have demonstrated the positive benefits of pursuing collaborative preservation work at an international scale.

Exploring new transfer technologies

Radio cannot be reduced to a single technology, and radio recordings are not limited to any one carrier medium, instead including an ever-expanding array of analog and digital formats that each requires its own special handling and care. As UCLA Ethnomusicology archivist Yuri Shimoda discusses in her article, one of the most at-risk formats in radio collections is lacquer discs, which were the dominant method for creating live radio recordings prior to the introduction of magnetic tape. As Shimoda explains, the age and fragility of these recordings often makes mechanical playback using a traditional turntable inadvisable, with archivists instead exploring new optical imaging technologies that capture the unique geometry of a disc’s grooves for later contactless playback via image-to-audio conversion software. Reviewing four systems that she believes hold particular promise, Shimoda assesses their respective availability, cost, ease of use, digital transfer quality, and suitability for high-yield workflows. As she shows, while these systems are in limited use at present, they have the potential to transform traditional methods of radio preservation and approaches to grooved media more broadly writ.

Developing sustainable digital solutions

If analog disc recordings from the previous century are an increasingly endangered format whose preservation requires swift and creative solutions, born-digital content from the past two decades is often at equal or greater risk of loss. These issues of digital longevity are at the forefront of the article by Radio Spectrum Archive (RSA) founder Thomas Witherspoon who, with sound historians Patrick Feaster and Shawn VanCour, discusses his project’s origins as a community-based archive, struggles to develop sustainable preservation models, and attempted solutions through a partnership with the Internet Archive. Created by and for a group of radio enthusiasts called “DXers” who search the airwaves for distant radio transmissions, the RSA developed the world’s first collection of “spectrum recordings,” which use computer software and plug-in receivers to capture large swaths of the broadcast spectrum. These recordings yield large files whose maintenance requires substantial digital infrastructure and specialized software for interactive playback. Discussing the history and future of the RSA, the authors delineate a series of technical, administrative, and procedural challenges for managing spectrum recordings that raise larger questions about sustainable solutions for preserving born-digital content.

Working with content creators

Just as radio itself is not a static form reducible to a single set of programing, distribution, or recording technologies, it has also engendered a panoply of related audio forms. As Mary Kidd, Sarah Nguyen, and Erica Titkemeyer discuss in their article, podcasting has borrowed extensively from radio and revived many popular genres from the medium’s earlier years, offering new outlets for many established broadcasting stations and networks while also giving rise to an entire new industry of independent content creation. The Preserve This Podcast project, run by Kidd and Nguyen, is a grant-funded initiative operating under the auspices of the New York Metropolitan Library Council that uses workshops, zines, podcasts, and other outreach strategies to educate independent podcasters on techniques for digital preservation and metadata management. As the authors note, the sheer volume of podcasts, lack of preservation training among podcast producers, and reliance on third-party hosting sites and proprietary software makes podcasting a particularly vulnerable medium in need of proactive preservation. Placing power directly into hands of podcast producers themselves, the authors show the importance of collaborations between archivists and content creators for advancing audio preservation projects.

Building alternative preservation networks

Continuing the search for preservation solutions beyond the bounds of formal archiving institutions, private collector Sammy Jones offers an in-depth interview with Paul Kornman, director of the Old Time Radio Researchers (OTRR) group, on the organization’s preservation and metadata management strategies. As Kornman explains, the OTRR group is a loosely-knit collective of volunteers who are private collectors and devotees of “old time radio” (OTR) and maintain a series of interrelated websites offering access to and information on OTR programing. While other OTR sites have proliferated on the web, Kornman’s OTRR group does not act as a simple content aggregator but instead receives files through donations and direct purchases from collectors who retain the physical media, a postcustodial model they also use for parallel collections of scripts, artwork, and fan magazines. However, what makes their site distinctive, Kornman explains, is its research emphasis, with creation of extensive descriptive metadata for each episode crowdsourced to knowledgeable listeners. While operating without any formal archival training, Kornman’s volunteer network has produced a vast online archive that demonstrates the powerful possibilities of harnessing community expertise.

Working with community volunteers

Closing the issue, contributors Amy Cooper Cary and Rosemary Pleva Flynn offer a special installment of their regular JAO Archival Management column devoted to the topic of volunteerism. As they note, crowdsourced solutions and other forms of volunteerism discussed by many of our contributors can yield powerful results when effectively managed but can be exploitative and ineffectual when they are not. Their article addresses issues relevant to those considering engaging with volunteers, ranging from motivation and training of volunteers to debates over financial remuneration and strategies for ensuring meaningful and rewarding work experiences. As the authors elaborate, caring for collections is predicated on caring about collections, and this affective labor is distributed across a much larger community of cultural stakeholders whose respective interests must be recognized and ethically managed to mutually beneficial ends.

No archives is an island

On a final note in opening this special issue, we wish to highlight the collaborative dimensions of radio preservation. No archives is an island, and preservation of any kind is the work of many hands stretching across multiple sectors of the archiving professions. This is particularly so for radio preservation, given the distributed nature of the collections, equipment, and expertise needed to successfully execute any given project. While the hero of radio preservation would be a content specialist, engineer, records manager, metadata expert, cataloger, digital asset manager, copyright authority, and community outreach liaison all in one, these skills and expertise are in practice more segmented and may not exist even within the space of a single archives. The resources needed to execute these various functions are themselves unequally distributed across different institutional spaces. The projects we have highlighted in this issue exemplify the possibilities opened by collaborative ventures between archiving institutions, practitioners, scholars, private collectors, and other stakeholders who possess needed and valued forms of expertise.

This collaborative spirit is also evinced, in a more performative sense, in the authorship of these articles, which combine multiple voices and place their component expertise together in rich and multilayered harmonies, as well as in the larger editorship of this issue, which represents a product greater than either of its guest editors could have managed alone. It is by actively seeking out these different contributions, perspectives, and expertise that we achieve greater richness and diversity in our collections, and within the archiving field itself. While the present issue represents only a small sample of current radio preservation activities, we hope in highlighting some of the rich projects our contributors are pursuing that we can encourage additional sharing, conversation, and other meaningful preservation work moving forward. As they say in radio, stay tuned for more … .

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura J. Treat

Laura Treat (she/her) is the Preservation Assets Coordinator at Austin PBS where she supports the preservation of the station’s contemporary and legacy broadcast collections. In her previous capacity as a moving image archivist her research has focused on increasing access to and engagement with local broadcast archives. Her work to preserve regional non-theatrical moving image collections was twice funded by Common Heritage grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her research has been published in The American Archivist and shared with professional organizations including the Association of Moving Image Archivists, the Society of American Archivists, and the American Association for State and Local History. She is the co-chair of the Association of Moving Image Archivist’s Local TV Task Force (2018-present) and served as a chair for AMIA’s Regional Audiovisual Archives (2018-2020) Committee and the News, Documentary, & Television Committee (2018-present).

Shawn VanCour

Shawn VanCour is assistant professor of media archival studies in UCLA’s Department of Information Studies and author of Making Radio: Early Radio Production and the Rise of Modern Sound Culture (Oxford University Press, 2018). His publications on the history and preservation of US radio and television have appeared in the IEEE Proceedings, Media, Culture & Society, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Modernist Cultures, Journal of Material Culture, Journal of Radio & Audio Media, American Music, and other venues. He is assistant director of the Radio Preservation Task Force for the United States Library of Congress’s National Recording Preservation Board, working with archives throughout the country to facilitate preservation of and access to historical and contemporary radio recordings.

Notes

1 The Nielsen Company, “Nielsen Total Audience Report,” April 20, 2020, https://www.nielsen.com (accessed June 13, 2020); for a summary of findings, see Radio Advertising Bureau, “Why Radio,” April 23, 2020, https://www.rab.com/secure/unusual/pdf/Radio%20Key%20Facts%20update%204.23.2020.pdf (accessed June 14, 2020). Pew Research Center reports indicate that, for US audiences, radio has held its position as the platform with the largest audiences throughout the past decade, with roughly ninety percent of all Americans ages twelve or older listening to terrestrial radio in any given week; see Pew Research Center, “Audio and Podcasting Fact Sheet,” https://www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/audio-and-podcasting/ (accessed June 12, 2020).

2 See Lauren Bratslavsky, “From Ephemeral to Legitimate: An Inquiry into Television’s Material Traces in Archival Spaces, 1950s–1970s” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oregon, 2013).

3 Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, Public Law 90-129, 90^th Congress, Nov 7, 1967; American Television and Radio Archives Act of 1976, Public Law 94-553, 94^th Congress, Oct 19, 1976.

4 Alan Gevinson, “A Brief History of the AAPB,” https://americanarchive.org/about-the-american-archive/history (accessed June 12, 2020); National Recording Preservation Board, “Radio Preservation Task Force,” Library of Congress (2014), https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-recording-preservation-plan/about-this-program/radio-preservation-task-force/ (accessed June 12, 2020).

5 For grants, see “National Recording Preservation Foundation: Safeguarding the Sound of America,” National Recording Preservation Foundation, http://recordingpreservation.org/ (accessed June 13, 2020); NEH Division of Preservation and Access, “Humanities Collections and Reference Resources,” National Endowment for the Humanities, https://www.neh.gov/grants/preservation/humanities-collections-and-reference-resources/ (accessed June 13, 2020); “Recordings at Risk,” Council on Library and Information Resources, https://www.clir.org/recordings-at-risk/ (accessed June 13, 2020); “Laura Bush 21^st Century Librarian Program,” Institute for Museum and Library Services, https://www.imls.gov/grants/available/laura-bush-21st-century-librarian-program/ (accessed June 13, 2020).

6 For history of Save our Sounds project, see “Save our Sounds,” British Library, https://www.bl.uk/projects/save-our-sounds (accessed June 12, 2020). For RIPDASA, see Pamela Vizner Oyarce, “Shaping the Future of Digital Preservation in Ibero America,” AVP Blog, December 12, 2019, https://blog.weareavp.com/shaping-the-future-of-digital-preservation-in-ibero-america-highlights-of-the-first-ripdasa-meeting (accessed June 14, 2020).

7 World Radio Day was first proclaimed by UNESCO member states in 2011 and adopted by the UN General Assembly as an International Day in 2012. It is honored on February 13 by UN member nations throughout the world.