Post by Lauren Bratslavsky, Illinois State University

“You’re early. There’s an episode… houseguest arrives early and I’m unprepared.” Peg Lynch’s voice trailed off as she opened the door to let me in. At the time, she was 94 and still mentally composing episode plots for the long-ago radio and television program she created, Ethel and Albert. It was a show about nothing really: a miswritten phone message, a broken light bulb, a failed dinner party, and so on. I stumbled across her show when I was poking around my university’s special collections. I read some Ethel and Albert scripts and was amused. I researched what I could about the show, but was disappointed at the overall lack of information. I learned from the archivist that Lynch was still alive. I nervously called her up and asked her some questions about what it was like to work in radio and television, especially as a woman. Lynch didn’t think it was that special, or why anyone would care about her experience in the business, but she invited me to her home to meet her. I later learned this was one of her endearing attributes – that is, inviting people to her home and treating them lovingly as long lost relatives.

I was a bit stunned to see Peg Lynch’s obituary more than a week ago in The New York Times. I knew that her health had taken a turn for the worse and that this may have been the 98-year-old woman’s last leg. What surprised me was the fact of the obituary itself, which led to obituaries in Variety, LA Times, and elsewhere. It was not that Lynch didn’t deserve the lengthy write-ups and accolades of her work in radio and television; she was long over due for such recognition. I was amazed that her little-known career was finally gaining notice. For a few years now, I’ve queried radio fans and television historians whether they’ve heard of Ethel and Albert, which gained a nation-wide audience in 1944 to 1950, then a television audience from 1950 to 1956, and back to radio until the 1970s. For some, the characters rang a bell, but very few clearly recognized the show or Peg Lynch.

To be fair, there are many radio and early television programs that are obscure, and indeed unmemorable. What makes Ethel and Albert, and the later radio incarnation, The Couple Next Door, remarkable is that Peg Lynch created the show and wrote every single episode by herself and starred in both the radio and television versions. The only analog to Lynch’s creator-writer-actor career was Gertrude Berg. Berg’s career is well documented in the history books and broadcasting lore, most likely in part due to the notoriety associated with the blacklist as well as awards, as noted in her obituary. Lynch’s work, never touched by controversy or industry awards, became just one of the thousands of entries in program encyclopedias. Without mechanisms such as television syndication or lasting celebrity status, like that of Lucille Ball or Betty White, Lynch fell further into obscurity. Had it not been for an email sent by Astrid King, Lynch’s daughter, the New York Times most likely would not have picked up on the news of her passing. And then, write-ups of Peg Lynch, “a pioneering woman in broadcast entertainment,” would not have circulated as it did.

A page from Peg Lynch’s scrapbook, posted to her Facebook page.

Why is Peg Lynch’s career significant for radio and television history? While obituaries frame her as a pioneer, I think a more apt description is that she persevered in an industry that was constantly changing and predominately male. As outlined in her obituary and in far greater detail on her website, Peg started in radio as a copywriter in the early 1930s at a local, small-town radio station in Minnesota. When she asked for a raise that reflected her many responsibilities, which included such tasks as writing ad copy and a daily women’s program, she was denied. She quit and continued to work in different radio stations, making her way out of the Midwest and to New York City. All the while, she held on to her creation, Ethel and Albert, a middle-aged married couple who were known for their gentle and realistic bickering. She first pitched Ethel and Albert to NBC in 1944, who made her an offer but wanted 50/50 ownership over the rights of the show. Lynch walked way. Instead, Lynch secured a network deal around the time NBC-Blue turned into the ABC network. Someone at WJZ (NBC-Blue/ABC’s flagship station) got a hold of Lynch, offered her an evening slot and allowed her to retain full ownership. Ethel and Albert was not sponsored by one company, but rather was part of the co-op model of radio sponsorship. In 1946, Ethel and Albert was a short-lived test case for television at WRGB, GE’s experimental studio. Ethel and Albert remained on the radio until 1950, when Lynch was offered a real television opportunity: a ten-minute recurring segment on NBC’s The Kate Smith Hour. First, in 1953, NBC had Lynch turn her popular ten-minute segment into a half-hour network sitcom, sponsored by Sunbeam. Sunbeam dropped the live sitcom in favor of a different genre, the spectacular (as chronicled in Variety). CBS then picked up Ethel and Albert, sponsored by Maxwell House, as a summer replacement for December Bride in 1955 (an awkward promo for the switch over is on YouTube).

Despite decent ratings, CBS did not continue working with Lynch. I suspect this decision had something to do with I Love Lucy and CBS not wanting to have two programs featuring bickering couples, even if Ethel and Albert were far more subdued and realistic than Lucy and Desi. ABC aired Ethel and Albert’s final television run, which was sponsored by Ralston Purina (Chex cereal and dog food). The show ended in 1956, at another transition moment when sitcom production moved from New York to Hollywood and from live to film. As Lynch recounted in her oral history (available through the University of Oregon’s Special Collections), there was talk of moving the show to Hollywood, but she preferred to stay on the East Coast. And really, she was tired of the weekly pressures to write new episodes while rehearsing and performing live. After television, she did some commercial work. Oddly enough, Lynch went back to radio, penning a near-copy of her original creation but under the title, The Couple Next Door for CBS Radio. Lynch had a couple more runs on the radio in the 1960s and 1970s, specifically on NBC’s Monitor and then NPR’s Earplay. With the last radio show in 1976, titled The Little Things in Life, Lynch’s long broadcast career ended.

The story of Peg Lynch can serve as a sort of public service announcement to those of us who toil in archives and seek out broadcast history’s margins. Two points in particular come to mind: the materiality of broadcast’s forgotten histories and the active role we play in shaping the use and availability of the material record. First, echoing Laura LaPlaca’s recent Antenna post, if we focus on all that is gone (and resign to the fact of this lack), then we overlook “the broadcast archive’s extraordinarily expansive physicality.” Lynch’s creative output is indeed physically available, even if mentions and critiques of her work are largely absent from our histories. The initial radio and television broadcasts were ephemeral in the sense that they were live broadcasts, moments of popular culture that began and ended in their programmed time slots. But there is a whole swath of materiality that exists in various forms and locations. There are the paper materials that Lynch saved throughout her career: scripts, letters, and a few other paper materials. Lynch’s mother compiled news clippings, photos, and various correspondence into scrapbooks. Decades after the height of her career, Lynch received an invitation to establish an archival collection at the University of Oregon in 1969 (how and why that happened is a whole other story), so all those scripts, scrapbooks, and paperwork are open for research (and soon, there will be more).

Throughout the 1970s and well into the 2000s, the physical meetings and tape-swapping of old time radio fans sustained the memory and the audio record of Ethel and Albert and The Couple Next Door. The fan conventions seem especially crucial in the age before the internet, as in, a time before old time radio websites posted shows and interviews. The conventions, and later on, the fan websites, fostered networks of old and new fans (Lynch loved her fans and her fans loved her). Even more material records exist now that we can search databases of digitized trade publications (like this article in Radio and TV Monitor, written by Lynch about the benefits of marital bickering, that is available on Lantern). References to the production side of Ethel and Albert certainly exist in the vast NBC corporate archives. The audio tapes exist in physical form and circulate digitally on the web. And the live television program? Those exists, too. Nearly every episode was filmed on a kinescope, which Lynch owned and now safely reside at the University of Oregon.

Which brings me to my second point: As radio and television scholars, we participate in recirculating the canon as well as seeking out new examples that corroborate or challenge existing histories. Just the very act of taking an interest in a little-known program or writer can help broaden the scope of broadcast histories or refine particular stories, such as the case of a little-known woman who was among the very few people to create, write, and star in her own show. The Peg Lynch Papers at the University of Oregon had been mostly dormant since they arrived decades ago. The archivists had various priorities in their immediate purview – the limited resources in such an institution necessarily limits which donors to follow up with in their twilight years. Thus, active interest from a faculty member or a researcher can help call greater attention to little-used or little-known collections, especially those collections whose creators are still alive. Those kinescopes of every episode? Up until two years ago, those were under Lynch’s couch and in cabinets in her home. After my first visit to Lynch’s home, I told the archivists about my visit, including the films and the fact that Lynch was still relatively lucid and had stories to tell. I’m sure that those kinescopes, as well as more papers, audio tapes, and ephemera would have made it to Oregon, thus joining the rest of Lynch’s collection. But the oral history? The personal relationships? The chance to participate in a collective nudge to ensure the preservation of a so-called ephemeral broadcast history? That probably would not have happened without some active participation and good old phone calls.

We can celebrate all that has survived, while prodding to discover what else exists. And we can continue to draw from the canon, while interrogating the wealth of materials that exists in the hopes of broadening and refining our histories. So long, Peg.

Distribution brochures for instructional radio series, from the paper archives of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) at University of Maryland

Post by Stephanie Sapienza, Project Manager at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)

Historical collections of audiovisual material are housed at repositories of an extraordinarily varied nature: within museums, libraries, historical societies, private collections; within media production units; and within traditional archives (only a small percentage of which are specifically dedicated to audiovisual collections). Archival paper collections are certainly more ubiquitous across all these institutions and more, representing the vast majority of the overall archival record.

As someone who has utilized, studied, worked in, and then managed projects related to audiovisual archives, there’s a trend I’ve been tracking for some time which continues to vex me. This trend relates to a very common scenario – split collections of media and related paper/textual collections – which are accepted into archival repositories and then, for lack of a better analogy, “separated at birth.” The collections are accessioned, and then broken apart and processed using very different and separate techniques, guidelines, and description schemas. Quite often, the two collections never get near each other again – physically or ontologically.

I will try to succinctly break down how this phenomenon occurs. Archival institutions often utilize a traditional description approach for paper-based materials such as transcripts, production and field recording notes, press kits, photos, correspondence, provenance and copyright materials. This usually results in an online finding aid. Conversely, institutions with significant audiovisual holdings traditionally favor an item-level approach, often with the aim of preparing for a preservation effort which requires metadata on item condition, formats, etc. Often the “split but related mixed media collections” scenario occurs within an institution that holds both paper and media materials, yet processes them differently and in different departments. Other times, as with the case study I’d like to discuss, the paper and media collections are also geographically separated.

Paper archives of the NAEB Collection

The National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) historic radio collection spans the breadth of twentieth century mass media. Throughout its 60 years of existence, the NAEB ushered in or helped to enable major changes in early educational broadcasting policy. The NAEB audio collection, now fully digitized through a collaboration with the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, is held at the University of Maryland Libraries and represents the archives of the radio programming service of the organization, known as the National Educational Radio Network (NERN). The paper materials, comprising correspondence, reports, clippings, speeches and more, remain at the Wisconsin Historical Society. The finding aid for the NAEB paper collection alone reveals that it contains a depth of contextual information relevant to the study of the tape collection. Digitized paper materials would reveal even more.

For example, The Jeffersonian Heritage, a 1952 series of 13 half-hour radio programs, was recorded by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters and syndicated for commercial-free broadcast. Funded by a Ford Foundation grant, The Jeffersonian Heritage starred English-born actor Claude Rains, made famous by appearances in The Invisible Man, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Casablanca, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious. An attempt to create radio that could be both “educational and appealing,” The Jeffersonian Heritage began its first series by educating the public about Thomas Jefferson’s attempt to have an anti-slavery clause written into the U.S. Constitution. With subsequent episodes attempting to tie themes from Jefferson’s personal and political history to contemporary events, The Jeffersonian Heritage provides a rich vein of material for explorations of how mid-twentieth century Americans engaged in remembrances of an agrarian past. How was Thomas Jefferson presented through the lens of anxieties about America’s place within the Cold War world? How were these episodes marketed and promoted to the public?*

Aural Press brochure, describing the American Life Series

To gain an accurate picture of the importance of these broadcasts, researchers would need to understand not just the content of the broadcast but also the circumstances of its production and its reception. For starters, the NAEB paper collections contain a brochure which reveals that the series was marketed by Aural Press of Western Michigan University as part of an “American Life Series” alongside other program series such as “Patterns in Pop Culture,” “Women,” “Abortion,” “Sounds of Poverty,” “Censorship,” and “The Nostalgia Merchants.” Placing one highly specific (and dramatic) series in context alongside such broadly-conceived topical documentary programs indicates that it held a certain level of specialized merit as an individual historical record.

A speech by former NAEB Chair William Harley which says the following about The Jeffersonian Heritage: “In 1951 we produced a dramatic history series called The Jeffersonian Heritage starring Claude Rains as Jefferson; a dramatic series on cultural anthropology called ‘Ways of Mankind’ and a series produced in conjunction with the Russian Institute at Harvard called ‘People Under Communism.’ The significance of this project is that our products convinced Scotty and his Board that educators were professionally competent and deserved support as they ventured into the new field of television. Thus did educational radio help the launching of educational television, for the Fund for Adult Education and later the Ford Foundation itself poured millions of dollars into projects fostering the start of education television.”

The above two pieces of contextual detail were uncovered only from the two small boxes of paper material that was retained with the audio collection at UMD. The Wisconsin finding aid reveals two additional folders of information on this series, which could unearth a great deal more contextual information which is ripe with potential for teaching curricula or individual scholarly research.

A second example is the series Why is a Writer?, which originally aired from 1960-61. The individual media records for the series contain the following description: “Produced by the Iowa School of the Air, this series focuses on various works of literature from Shakespeare to Twain.” The description for one individual program, “Critic of the king,” has an additional program description: “This program focuses on English writer Leigh Hunt, also known as James Henry Leigh Hunt.”

UMD has, by all means, a very richly descriptive individual record for this one individual program recording – even to have two separate descriptions (one for the series as a whole and one for the program) is uncommon in most descriptive catalogs.

A cursory search in the NAEB paper archives unlocked the following information:

Iowa School of the Air Teaching Aid for Why Is a Writer?

In 1967-67, several years after it originally aired, Why is a Writer was still being distributed to educators throughout the country through Iowa School of the Air, along with teaching aids and instructions on how to teach the material. This teaching aid included instructions for educators such as “Every broadcast should be preceded by a short warm-up period so that the pupils know why they are listening to and what to listen,” and “Every broadcast should be followed by an integration period during which the students tie together facts, form generalizations, discuss ideas presented, and plan related work.” Additionally, the teaching aid contains a much more detailed program description for “Critic of the King:” “‘Critic of the King’ is another way of describing the English writer Leigh Hunt. Through history the writer has often been a critic of powerful through corrupt men. This is often a dangerous practice. Leigh Hunt knew the danger, but wrote as he felt, nonetheless. James Henry Leigh Hunt, 1784-1859, was the friend of many great romantic poets, including Byron, Shelley, Moore, and Lamb. He was a liberal in politics and was the editor of many periodicals.”

Why is a Writer shows up again in paperwork related to programs later rejected by NPR in 1976 for “content validity.” To pass the content validity test, NPR required “users and/or producers of Instructional Program materials to provide documented research and evaluation results on the utilization and effectiveness of such radio program materials in formal teaching-learning situations.” This indicates that sometime between the mid-60’s and the mid-’70s, Why Is a Writer? became “invalid” for teaching purposes. This raises two interesting research questions: 1) What pedagogical changes or educational reform may have led to changing perspectives on the “validity” of Why is a Writer?, and 2) How did educators and users of the Instructional Program materials feel about NPR making content validity assertions which affected available content?

Both of the above examples have relevant contextual information related to both the subject matter inherent in the content itself, as well as the cultural and sociological forces which shaped its production and distribution. The NAEB collections account for more than a record of a specific broadcasting entity and its industrial/narrative production. They also provide an in-depth look at the engagements and events of American history, as they were broadcast to and received by the general public in the twentieth century. This may be evident in the recordings themselves, but the potential scholarly and educational insights are particularly apparent when presented with rich, contextual materials to accompany it.

The fact stands that there is a lost opportunity here, and in many similar instances. Unless researchers are able to travel between Wisconsin and Maryland to conduct this research (assuming they even know that there is deep contextual information to be found there, since no electronic catalog connects the two collections). Additionally, in instances where these two collections are linked, it could partially relieve the burden of catalogers, lessening the amount of labor needed to provide access to richer descriptive detail.

Despite public broadcasting’s mandate to “inform, inspire and educate,” most of this important historical content, produced at significant cost, has never been seen or heard again after its initial brief moments on the air. MITH is developing and seeking funding for a project which aims to create a prototypical user interface which would allow researchers to explore the split NAEB collections together in context, and hopefully provide a blueprint to inspire further work in this area. The broader goals of the project are to look at ways in which scholarly and archival processes and needs can converge in order to raise awareness of the cultural significance of broadcasting collections.

*Select prose from the discussion on The Jeffersonian Heritage contributed by Jennifer Guiliano.

Post by Brian DeShazor, Pacifica Radio Archives

The Pacifica Foundation, founded in 1946 by Lewis Hill – a Quaker, conscientious objector, poet, and pacifist – began broadcasting at KPFA, 94.1 FM in Berkeley, California, on April 15, 1949. It was the first of its kind. The mission was to create a new kind of radio, supported by listeners, owing nothing to sponsors, providing an outlet for poetry, independent journalism, free speech, creative expression, and a safe haven for artistic experiments with the radio medium. Predating National Public Radio, over the next 28 years, the network added four stations: KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles, CA (1959), WBAI 99.5 FM NYC, NY (1959), KPFT 90.1 FM Houston, TX (1970), and WPFW 89.3 FM Washington D.C. (1978). Perhaps best known as a chronicler of social justice movements and cultural change, Pacifica stations contributed to their communities by broadcasting unique coverage of HUAC hearings, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the women’s movement, the gay liberation movement, the student free speech movement, the Black power movement, the Native American Indian movement, and many others. Pacifica stations consistently embraced the performing and literary arts, offering sometimes the only forum for cutting edge and classical arts, as well as providing a stage to experiment with music, radio drama, spoken word, sound sculpture, and the art of radio documentary. This may be my favorite description of the programming ideals from a 1960 KPFK member folio program guide (all of which are freely available online at Archive.org):

“As a listener-sponsored station KPFK is free from the restrictions and inhibitions of commercial radio. We may attempt to discharge our special responsibility to the community with vigor, intelligence and imagination.

Our approach to broadcasting is permissive, bold and somewhat naive, because we feel that these attributes hold the secrets of growth and true wisdom. We choose to focus on the positive aspects of our freedom; what we are freed for; rather than what we are freed from.

We are free to serve: By tapping the creative resources of our nation and community we give hearing to deserving and unknown literary and musical talent, we provide a forum for the full discussion of public affairs, and we serve the community by an active participation in its cultural and intellectual life.

We are free to explore: In public affairs we are free to probe beyond the superficial level. Our programs are designed to stimulate, not to mirror complacency.

We are free to innovate: By broadcasting original works, special interviews, and live concerts, we can give free radio its rightful position as a provocative and intimate communicative medium. We are free to create new formats and recombine old ones. We can afford to risk without fear of the consequences on a popularity rating scale.

We are free to challenge: Our view of current happenings and long-term trends in this community and the world can be fresh and insistently honest, equally free to challenge the dogmas of the avante garde or the traditionalist, the intellectual or the anti-intellectual, the happy few or the complacent many, as the occasion requires. We frankly admit our prejudice, against the pretentious in any form or walk of life. Sacred cows find no sanctuary in our studios.

We have no commitments other than to these ideals.”

The Pacifica Radio Archives has over 60,000 program units, and has digitized approximately 10% since the advent of the digital age thanks to several grant funded projects and by public request. We are currently in the final months of a two-year project to preserve and make accessible 2,000 programs covering the women’s movement, in a project titled “American Women Making History and Culture: 1963-1982”, funded in part by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission at the National Archives and Records Administration.

From the Vault is the Pacifica Radio Archives radio series produced weekly to rebroadcast and contextualize the history captured on reel-to-reel tape from 1949 to about 1999 by the Pacifica radio stations. The series is heard on the Pacifica Radio stations and its 200 affiliates. The series was created in 2006 in an effort to disseminate the history preserved to new audiences, promote the grant funded projects that helped digitize selections of the collection, and raise funds to continue preservation and access projects.

With thousands of tapes to choose from, it’s no easy task to curate. We begin each week mindful of current events and obituaries. We work from a calendar of historic events, commemorations and anniversaries to motivate our research. Programs of note include: The first march on Washington for Gay Rights, 1979; a previously unknown 1964 speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and my personal favorite, Flora Molton, a blind blues street singer from Washington D.C.

Gospel and country blues musician Flora Molton.

We are always seeking ways to make the materials contemporary and reach new audiences. In the works is a program on the 50th anniversary of the Watts Uprising in Los Angeles. We will be using the KPFK 1965 radio documentary, The Fire This Time, but not in the traditional way. On July 10, 2015, the archival sound will be used in a live concert event produced by Grand Performances as source material in a new hip-hop/ rap music mixtape performance curated by Lyricist Lounge co-founder Anthony Marshall, featuring dead prez, Jimetta Rose, ill CamiLLe, Bambu, food4Thot, and members of the Watts Prophets. From the Vault has produced 486 one-hour episodes to date.

Now that the Pacifica Radio Archives is partnered with the RPTF we look forward to expanding our Campus Campaign and our efforts to make the radio history part of educational curriculum.

Online, as each story from the bombing developed, web editors covered up traces of earlier (and perhaps inaccurate) versions of the events thus creating silences in a potential archive and skewing future researchers on its development. Few inaccurate reports may “make it” as important enough for archiving because of the way they were criticized by the FBI or by satirists like Jon Stewart.

Although in their own ways problematic, off-air broadcasts have been fertile places for media studies scholars hoping to make sense of an event, perspective, text, or celebrity. With the growing popularity of the “officially-licensed” archive and the death of VHS, these off-air broadcasts with commercials included are increasingly difficult to find (and may even be illegal). In other words, although we often remark on the concept of Flow, rarely do we actually perform Flow studies, largely because of a lack of access.

Today, Antenna is launching a new series, “Teach Hacks,” for our readers and writers to share their own tips and experiences using technology for research and in the classroom, a sort of “E-D-U How-To.” I’ll start this series by pointing out what I use to digitize broadcast and give you some tips on saving those files for posterity (note: fair use rules are for off-air broadcast aren’t as lenient as you think, so proceed with caution).

What You Need to Digitize and Save Broadcasts:

1.) TV Tuner: The first thing you need is a TV Tuner/Video Recording device. You will likely want a high definition (HD) device as the standard devices capture terrible quality. Because I have a Mac, I use the eyetv HD video recorder from elgato, and I love it (here’s a similar PC product).  Many such devices now also capture “game play” for those Antenna readers interested in archiving that realm. For example, Elgato has a game capture device (that works on PC or Mac) specifically suited to that purpose which can also be cleverly rigged for TV capture. Here’s a sample video of the device in action.

These devices make very large video recordings, depending upon the resolution your set-top box is set to output. HD channels on my DISH Network box output at 1080p (HD resolution), meaning that an hour’s worth of programming takes up about 8 GB of space. You then take that video raw file and, with included software, convert it/compress it down to an AVI or an MOV (or a variety of other available video formats) to make it as small as you have room for them. (VLC is a free program that will play all these formats, while Azul for the iPad will do the same for a nominal fee. If you’ve ever had a video file not play during a lecture, VLC will be your friend. It will also play volume levels by 200, 300, 400, 500 percent, so it’s especially useful for quiet clips.)

Maintaining a higher-than-necessary quality, most of my hour-long recordings will end up being about 1.8-2 GB in size. So far, I’ve used about 2 TB (terabytes) of disk space for my broadcast archive, which means I have some external hard drive needs.

2.) External Hard Drive: External hard drives and flash drives seem like convenient back-up options, however liberal estimates only give them a 6-11 year life expectancy. (!!) Many still will not last this long, particularly if you move around with them often and/or constantly plug and unplug them from your computer. Newer external hard drives like the Western Digital My Book Live work in the same way, except that they are connected directly to your WiFi network, and thus your computer’s connection to the hard drive is via “the cloud” and not a USB.

These devices also have mobile apps that allow tablets and mobile phones to also connect to your personal files instead of just computers. In other words, if you’re at a conference and your computer fails, you can borrow an iPhone an iPad or another computer and connect to your personal cloud for easy retrieval.

More secure still is something like drobo, a data storage device housing several hard drives (purchased separately) that each back each other up. So, when one hard drive fails, as they all will eventually, pop it out, pop another one into its place and all your data remains secure and uncorrupted. Here’s a geek explaining the drobo.

3.) Back-up Clouds: Finally, to make sure your new broadcast archive is as secure as possible, you need to make sure you’ve saved your files off-site, away from your server so that in case of natural disasters, fires, floods, etc., you won’t have depended entirely upon one device to save your stuff.

Many academics have used DropBox to house their records, which stores your data in a cloud (DropBox’s own server), but you may prefer a more intuitive data backup method with less space constraint. I suggest CrashPlan+. For a subscription fee, CrashPlan+ backs up your files automatically, constantly detecting changes and updates and saving as necessary. Certain CrashPlan+ subscriptions, unlike DropBox, will save an unlimited amount of data, which is good news if you plan on backing up an entire 100+ episode season of a talk show for instance. If your local server is destroyed, CrashPlan+ also offers a service of creating a new local server loaded and mailed to you with your files safe and secure, so you don’t experience this: How Toy Story 2 Almost Got Deleted.

Professional archivists suggest saving your important data in at least two formats, and in at least two different places. By having both server-hard and cloud copies, you’ve accomplished both, protecting your files for years to come or until available software no longer supports it.

Loyal Secretaries

Anyone who has ever surveyed the papers of the “great men” who populate the archives of NBC, the NAB, and the FCC have surely read countless letters to and from executives, lobbyists, and civil servants. That is admittedly one of the dazzling aspects of doing this work. What can beat finding redacted letters from J. Edgar Hoover to the chairman of the FCC? (Well, finding uncensored letters, but that’s another matter.) What I came to realize, after searching through both mundane and thrilling letters and memos, was that I was reading documents thanks to the labor of female secretaries. I want to know more about these women, but I worry that their usefulness to history is tied solely to the men who employed them.

We have seen this troublesome situation throughout pop culture. I didn’t love the recent film J. Edgar, but I was fascinated by the role of Hoover’s secretary, Helen Gandy. This was the person who most likely typed some of the letters I had come across in my research.

When I watch the film Quiz Show, and I do watch it often, the brief scene in which Robert Kintner’s secretary is rude to Richard Goodwin is a great moment because it reveals her protectiveness of Kintner—over his position and his time. She is listed only as “Kintner’s Secretary” on imdb.com, and I wonder if she was named in the book that the film is based on. Or was she just a convenient tool for Paul Attanasio, the film’s screenwriter? An overweight bitch to throw in as symbol of network haughtiness?

The fraction of letters I have been able to index thus far have been typed up by Helen A. Fruth, secretary to Justin Miller, who steered the NAB through the transition to television. While Fruth is the anonymous typist in many cases, in others she is the author who corresponds with domestic and international figures to coordinate Miller’s schedule and alert them as to his whereabouts. She managed Miller’s professional life and is an agent in the story of the NAB, but she is most certainly sidelined. Her labor and her words imbue every document, but her name isn’t on the archival box. What stories could she tell if her correspondence were housed somewhere?

Women who Watch

Some of the most entertaining documents I have encountered are letters of complaint written by highly motivated viewers. When I was photographing these letters I was fixated on the content—the righteous indignation, the archaic standards, the vitriol—and not the authors. After the post-Console-ing Passions light bulb turned on, I went back through some of the letters that my invaluable research assistant, Catherine Martin, had indexed and transcribed. Once I was able to divvy up the authors according to their sex (many of the women identify themselves as Mrs. Husband’s Full Name), I was able to detect an intriguing pattern: the frequency with which women authored letters in groups.

Formal and informal women’s clubs protested TV content, expressed concerns, or relayed news of their passage of resolutions about TV content. These women enacted their citizenship not only by notifying the FCC of their thoughts on TV but by mobilizing around the issue in the first place. So far I have not encountered this same collective behavior coming from the men. Was it necessary for women to show strength by expressing their opinions in groups? Does the lone female writer (the mother, the housewife) concerned about her children lack the status of a group of women devoting its time to the medium supposedly threatening the moral health of the country? The way in which women confronted the threat is infinitely more interesting to me than how they believed that threat manifested.

As I shape this research project into something whole and coherent, I’m optimistic about the ways in which I can merge the concerns of feminism with the more obscure archival documents that seem to want to exist as neutral and objective artifacts. Where are the women in the industrial and regulatory history of television? They’re there, and now—educated by some of the great presenters at Console-ing Passions 2012—I can see them.

On, Archives! A Conference on Media, Theater, and History was a fitting tribute to the Wisconsin Center. Featuring a special symposium on broadcasting in the 1930s and a variety of other offerings on all manner of topics, the four-day conference saw a diverse group of scholars from North America, Europe, and the United Kingdom engage in a series of panels that drew many useful connections across eras, nations, and media forms. The presentations and discussions consistently reinforced this need to examine issues and events in terms of broader contexts, whether it be the historical longue durée or the transnational development of mass media systems. It also emphasized the central role of archival research in these endeavors.

The 1930s were a particularly critical decade in radio’s development as a mass medium and this era was addressed from a number of perspectives. Len Kuffert examined the development of taste communities in relation to Canadian radio during this period. Hans-Ulrich Wagner looked at the relationship between the prevailing regional identities and the emergent national culture in German radio of the 1930s. Anne F. MacLennan presented some of the early findings of her Remembering Radio project, which seeks to preserve and analyze the recollections of those Canadians who participated in this early period when individuals were still ‘learning how to listen’. Sian Nicholas also presented her findings pertaining to 1930s radio columns in Britain. Her analysis elucidated the relationship between print and broadcast media forms during this period, highlighting the role of newspaper writers in the production of meanings around the BBC. Nicholas astutely reminded those in attendance that the the BBC had served a discursive “function” for various social actors during this period, and that these early formulations established the basis for the way in which the BBC would be perceived in the decades to come. Jason Loviglio’s paper analyzed the aesthetic and thematic similarities between 1930s radio soaps and contemporary NPR hit “This American Life” to interrogate the meaning of the medium’s representations of domesticity in different eras. His presentation provided a timely reminder that contemporary radio is deserving of increased attention from media scholars.

There were many fine presentations of archival research, but there were also presentations that examined the role of the archive and the researcher in contemporary life. Tim Wall and Paul Long of Birmingham City University called for academics to consider how they might operate as public service intellectuals. They asserted that, beyond the more conventional practices of conducting archival research and examining the institutions behind them, academics might have an important role to play in preservation and cultural memory projects. Long’s presentation detailed his attempts to secure the resources needed to clean and catalogue the collection of deceased BBC producer Philip Donnellan. This provided a tangible example of the way in which such efforts of advocacy and facilitation might help to turn buried collections into accessible archives.

On, Archives! featured a  number of excellent keynote addresses. Tino Balio initiated the proceedings with a history of the early years of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.  Kate Lacey concluded the first day with an excellent address that used her research in 1930s radio in Britain to urge those in attendance to look beyond the gendered active/passive dichotomy that pervades so much thinking about media engagement. Her talk set the  tone for a number of addresses that would deploy archival findings as a mechanism through which to interrogate dominant discursive constructs. On Wednesday, Matthew Bernstein talked about his own experiences as a film researcher in the Wisconsin archives, while noted film theorist and historian Marc Vernet gave the final keynote on Thursday in which he addressed the relationship between film theory and film history at the present juncture.

Obviously, On, Archives! featured far more than I can cover in this very limited report. The conference has to be considered  a tremendous success on all fronts. It boasted excellent presentations, invigorating discussions, and thought-provoking keynotes. It even featured an active Twitter backchannel via the #OnArchives hashtag. More than this, it generated a sense of excitement about archival work and its role in contemporary scholarship and public life.  While the event may be over, it seems that it has inspired many conversations that are only just beginning.