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Introducing U of M Radio On Your Historic Dial
By Karen Obermeyer-Kolb
As mentioned in a previous post "Reel to Reel," University Archives received grant funding to digitize 2,000+ tapes of recorded audio held in our collections. These past couple months have been busy hiring a Project Archivist (That’s me!), selecting tapes for digitization, shipping them to the outside vendor, and now we are in stages of receiving the digital files and preparing them for online access!
Unidentified man with KUOM microphone. University of Minnesota Radio and Television Broadcasting records, University Archives
Launching U of M Radio on Your Historic Dial
Today we are launching our U of M Radio on Your Historic Dial podcast based on the new materials. It will be posted biweekly here on the From the Archivist blog and is available on iTunes and Google Play. Below you will find the first episode, you can listen in the browser here and read the script below.
Episode 1: Intro to the Collection
You are listening to U of M Radio on Your Historic Dial Podcast and this is episode 1: Intro to the Collection. I’m the project archivist, Karen, here at University Archives and today we’re getting our feet wet by answering a couple questions.
Maybe you’re wondering what is University of Minnesota Radio?
This podcast and this project are not produced by the current campus station, Radio K, although it is their predecessors that we will be talking about, KUOM and WMMR. KUOM, previously under the call letters WLB, was the professional radio station on campus. The University actually received the first radio broadcasting license in the state of Minnesota in 1922, with experiments in broadcasts by F.W. Springer as early as 1912. The station continued their operations until 1993 when they merged with WMMR, which had been the student run campus radio station since the late 40s. They became the station heard on campus today, Radio K, which still broadcasts on the same frequency and under the call letters of KUOM.We also have some recordings in our collection from University Media Resources and Visual Education, which produced University courses over the radio and rebroadcast speeches and commencements across the state.
On to our second question, what is this project?
The project I am working on received funding to get at least 2,000 of our 11,000+ reel-to-reel tape collection digitized which will mean greater access and preservation of the recordings from these organizations of U of M radio. It will mean access because in the near future anyone with internet connection can listen to these tapes and in listening we’ll have a better idea of what is actually on them. As much as we can hope, the archives world knows labels don’t always tell the truth or maybe not the whole truth. In our first batch of digital files I’ve already discovered programs we didn’t know we had because they were recorded on the second half of a tape without being noted on their cases. This project is also a great step towards preserving these historic documents because the unfortunate truth is physical materials deteriorate for many reasons. We do keep our audiovisual collections in cold storage which prevents, or at least slows down, much of this, but with digital technologies we can have copies that don’t require outdated equipment or ha...
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By Karen Obermeyer-Kolb
As mentioned in a previous post "Reel to Reel," University Archives received grant funding to digitize 2,000+ tapes of recorded audio held in our collections. These past couple months have been busy hiring a Project Archivist (That’s me!), selecting tapes for digitization, shipping them to the outside vendor, and now we are in stages of receiving the digital files and preparing them for online access!
Unidentified man with KUOM microphone. University of Minnesota Radio and Television Broadcasting records, University Archives
Launching U of M Radio on Your Historic Dial
Today we are launching our U of M Radio on Your Historic Dial podcast based on the new materials. It will be posted biweekly here on the From the Archivist blog and is available on iTunes and Google Play. Below you will find the first episode, you can listen in the browser here and read the script below.
Episode 1: Intro to the Collection
You are listening to U of M Radio on Your Historic Dial Podcast and this is episode 1: Intro to the Collection. I’m the project archivist, Karen, here at University Archives and today we’re getting our feet wet by answering a couple questions.
Maybe you’re wondering what is University of Minnesota Radio?
This podcast and this project are not produced by the current campus station, Radio K, although it is their predecessors that we will be talking about, KUOM and WMMR. KUOM, previously under the call letters WLB, was the professional radio station on campus. The University actually received the first radio broadcasting license in the state of Minnesota in 1922, with experiments in broadcasts by F.W. Springer as early as 1912. The station continued their operations until 1993 when they merged with WMMR, which had been the student run campus radio station since the late 40s. They became the station heard on campus today, Radio K, which still broadcasts on the same frequency and under the call letters of KUOM.We also have some recordings in our collection from University Media Resources and Visual Education, which produced University courses over the radio and rebroadcast speeches and commencements across the state.
On to our second question, what is this project?
The project I am working on received funding to get at least 2,000 of our 11,000+ reel-to-reel tape collection digitized which will mean greater access and preservation of the recordings from these organizations of U of M radio. It will mean access because in the near future anyone with internet connection can listen to these tapes and in listening we’ll have a better idea of what is actually on them. As much as we can hope, the archives world knows labels don’t always tell the truth or maybe not the whole truth. In our first batch of digital files I’ve already discovered programs we didn’t know we had because they were recorded on the second half of a tape without being noted on their cases. This project is also a great step towards preserving these historic documents because the unfortunate truth is physical materials deteriorate for many reasons. We do keep our audiovisual collections in cold storage which prevents, or at least slows down, much of this, but with digital technologies we can have copies that don’t require outdated equipment or ha...