Locating the Radio Archive: New Histories, New Challenges

Abstract

This article considers the Radio Preservation Task Force’s (RPTF) recruitment efforts and current list of member archives, assessing its success in fulfilling its mandate from the Library of Congress’s National Recording Preservation Board to adequately inventory archival collections throughout the country and facilitate preservation of and educational access to materials within these collections. The RPTF’s membership, it argues, represents significant progress in overcoming initial favoritism toward collections of network broadcasting materials, enabling the creation of alternative forms of cultural memory and production of new histories that can speak to issues and constituencies neglected in traditional histories of radio broadcasting. At the same time, it proposes further attention to nonconventional archives that may not take radio or media as their focus, warns against privileging sound recordings at the expense of contextualizing paper documentation, and stresses the need to consider forms of radio content beyond broadcast programming and to actively preserve born-digital materials within the present as well as recordings from the past. While the RPTF has helped expand existing conceptions of the radio archive, significant challenges and opportunities remain for identifying and preserving the full range of American radio heritage for both current and future generations.

Notes

1. I use the word “institutions” here in the more expansive sense of the term proposed by Theodore Schellenberg (2003), including everything from major government and business organizations to churches, unions, and individual homes (p. 16).

2. For an initial compilation of data on holdings of RPTF member archives, see the organization’s pilot Blacklight database project, created in collaboration with the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (RPTF & ARSC, 2016).

3. Among this list of alternative forms of radio, the NRPB (2012) recognizes podcasting as a form of sound recording in need of preservation but treats this as a category separate from “radio” and does not include podcasts within the RPTF’s mandate, applying the “radio” descriptor solely to broadcast content (p. 19).

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Notes on contributors

Shawn VanCour

Shawn VanCour (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, 2008) is assistant professor of Media Archival Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. His research interests include media history, theory, and aesthetics, sound studies, and archival studies.