#audiovisual heritage

It’sWorld Day for Audiovisual Heritage! 

To celebrate, organizations around the world are showcasing their sound and moving image collections to remind us all that these records of collective memory are both wonderful and fragile.

Here at NPR, the Research, Archives & Data Strategy team (RAD, formerly the NPR Library) protects and preserves NPR’s audio archives. Our programming was first heard on-air on April 20, 1971, starting with Senate hearings about the war in Vietnam. (C-SPAN had yet to be created.) NPR’s first episode of All Things Considered debuted a few weeks later on May 3, 1971.

In 1972, NPR created the Program Library, with a mission to make programs available for production and broadcast purposes, as well as for historical and scholarly research. In 1976, NPR entered into partnerships to make the Program Library publicly accessible. The ‘Public’ part of National Public Radio is really important to us, and it’s a big part of why we do the work we do to make sure people now and in the future can listen to and learn from our collection.

Over the past 45 years, NPR has used several new types of audio media, from open reel tape to optical CD to digital WAV files. These formats reflect the best available materials of the time period in which they were created, but they are also in danger of degradation. Right now, almost 94,000 hours of NPR audio are at-risk, stored on either tape or CD.

NPR’s RAD team continues to collect, assign metadata and create access to programming like All Things Considered, keeps track of NPR’s latest podcasts, and looks to the future for what will come next. RAD collections also include raw audio, images, documents and objects related to NPR journalism and radio broadcasting. Our digitized and born-digital collections are accessible in our in-house content management system, Artemis, and are starting to grow beyond program audio as NPR content expands into music videos like Tiny Desk Concerts and live social media video on our Facebook pages.

When we say the ‘Public’ part of NPR is important to us, we mean it. We are making every effort to allow for wider public access to our collections. But first, we must preserve and digitize!

-NPR RAD intern Greta Pittenger