KMUW and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting to Preserve Historic Public Television and Radio Programs from Across Kansas

Two-year Kansas Public Media Preservation Project is funded with $407,000 grant from The Council on Library and Information Resources

KMUW 89.1 – FM and The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) announced today a collaborative effort to preserve and make accessible historic television and radio programs produced by Kansas public media stations. The resulting online collection, to be digitized from deteriorating and obsolete formats, will showcase statewide coverage of social issues, commentary, public reporting and history from more than 60 years of Kansas public media archival collections. The two-year Kansas Public Media Preservation Project is made possible by a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources.

“We couldn’t be more thrilled to have this opportunity to quite literally rescue a unique record of Kansas history and make it available for all to explore,” said Debra Fraser, KMUW General Manager. “The Kansas Public Media Preservation Project will culminate in an unprecedented audio-visual record of local response to national issues and state-specific news, culture and art from our nation’s heartland.”

The Kansas collection consists of programs produced by KMUW, High Plains Public Radio, KPR, KPTS, KRPS, KHCC and Vietnamese Public Radio. Largely unseen and unheard since they were first broadcast, the programs risk deterioration on obsolete magnetic media, which must be digitized before physical degradation makes preservation impossible.

These programs will be the first from Kansas contributed to the AAPB, a collaboration between the Library of Congress and Boston public media producer WGBH. Over the course of the Kansas Public Media Preservation Project, the participating stations will provide digitized copies of more than 3,000 programs to be preserved in the Library of Congress and made accessible by WGBH on the AAPB website at americanarchive.org.

“With this new collection, we can fill a gap in the AAPB’s geographic representation, making content from Kansas public media archives available for all to access,” said Alan Gevinson, Ph.D., AAPB project director at the Library of Congress. “Scholars, educators and the public will now be able to view and listen to decades of local stories on important civil rights cases, tumultuous weather, industry shakeups and more.”