In 1987 a few of us were brainstorming at the St. Louis Press Club about the dearth of preserved local media history. Within a period of 15 minutes we came up with a plan, and the St. Louis Media Archive was born.
There was never any money. We had no idea how to adequately preserve the material. All we really did was gather anything that seemed worthy of saving and turn it over to the public library, where it supposedly would be properly handled and cataloged.
They succeeded at cataloging, but preservation remained on the bottom of the priority list because of the cost. As the library’s waning interest in the project became more apparent a few years ago, I set up my own foundation, raised money and offered to pay for the digitization of over 500 radio airchecks I had gathered. They refused the offer, saying it was not a priority. Would they loan them to me (I had used my own money to purchase them) so I could have a local recording studio digitize them? Absolutely not. That violated their policies.
So I started another collection from scratch and am in the process of digitizing the audio for storage on a hard drive for researchers to access. In addition I make small snippets of the airchecks available in the radio section of our foundation’s research website: http://www.stlmediahistory.com
We manage to get a lot of donated services and are able to pay a small amount to a friendly studio for digitizing. Our media history collection is also growing. We have 6,000 images from local media history available for viewing on line and are finishing construction of a small research room in a local museum for listening, viewing and perusal of our files.
The downside is our lack of any sophistication and sense of organization. Anyone expecting an institutional approach to our preservation will be disappointed. Our cataloging is all being done on Omeka shareware by me. Any professional archivist would probably run from the building screaming.
But we have accomplished the two most basic tasks found in our foundation’s charter: We are preserving local media history and are making it available to the public.
(Frank Absher is a broadcast veteran who served as an adjunct professor for a few years before retiring, which is when he really got busy.)
Let them hear it 