Editor’s Remarks: Preservation and Radio

Abstract

Radio or sound archives and their scarcity have been an ongoing researcher concern. This issue of the Journal of Radio & Audio Media features a symposium on Radio Research as Critical Archival Studies. The symposium showcases work from the recent conference of the Radio Preservation Task Force, which is a project of the Library of Congress’s National Recording Preservation Board. This second conference of the Radio Preservation Task Force focused on the theme, “From Archive to Classroom.” This theme emerges in the contributions to this issue’s symposium. In their introduction to the symposium, Amanda Keeler and Josh Shepperd note that the record of media is incomplete (Keeler & Shepperd, 2019). As current director of the Radio Preservation Task Force, Shepperd notes that “radio’s new association with the critical archival studies landscape makes it a promising avenue for coalitional work (p. 6).” Moving beyond the collection of archival materials, the crucial work to make materials available in the curriculum has begun. In “The PodcastRE Project: Curating and Preserving Podcasts (and Their Data),” Jeremy Wade Morris, Samuel Hansen, and Eric Hoyt explain that the “diversity of new audio is part of what makes podcasts significant as a sonic, cultural form; podcasting offers both the potential to bring new voices into the mediascapes of everyday users and the possibility for sound workers to learn new skills and techniques for expressing and sharing ideas” (Morris, Hansen, & Hoyt, 2019, p. 8). In their own work to develop the PodcastRE, a digital archive of podcasts, Morris, Hansen, and Hoyt deal with the complexities of preserving the elusive podcasts on different platforms, behind paywalls, disappearing titles, the metadata, RSS feeds, and other analytical elements. In “Democracy in the Air: Radio as a Complement to Face-to-Face Discussion in the New Deal,” Timothy J. Shaffer demonstrates the critical role the radio played in the development of public discussions, through the development of democratic conversations in local communities (Shaffer, 2019). David Jenemann argues convincingly in “Propaganda and Preservation: Missed Opportunities and Inadvertent Archives in Radio Research” that the analysis of right-wing radio conducted by Leo Löwenthal, Theodor Adorno, and their colleagues made them inadvertent radio preservationists (Jenemann, 2019). Amanda Keeler demonstrates some of the reactions to Dimension X and