![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
They gave us wings to fly, but then they took away the sky
I am staring at the screen and crying because 99.5 WBAI FM was shuttered by its parent station today, with no warning to either the local station or its listeners. The archives also seem to be gone. My parents who lived in New York in the '60's and '70's used to wake up to its daily broadcast of Phil Ochs' "Outside of a Small Circle of Friends." I was interviewed last summer by Jim Freund for the long-running science fiction program Hour of the Wolf. Now all that history's pulled out as if it never had been. The station was a Brooklyn institution—local, political, progressive, hands-on. Syndicated nationwide content is not the same. And it cannot pretend it always was.
no subject
I'm so sorry, especially about the archives.
I'm surprised they didn't rehome the archives to a national institution for preserving them.
For example, in Britain
"The British Library is recognised as the home of the nation’s radio archive. The current radio collection comprises around 250,000 hours. Additionally, via a longstanding arrangement with the BBC, the Library also provides research access to the extensive radio collections of the BBC Archives.
To address the gaps in our recordings, the National Radio Archive project (part of the Save our Sounds programme) plans to create a digital radio archive that will preserve a representative proportion of ongoing UK radio output and make this available for research.
Our first step is to build a pilot radio archive, covering up to 50 stations from across the UK, with the potential to develop this into a long-term service.
We will be using speech recognition technology to increase the searchability of radio and to encourage its integration with other, text-based media. The selection of content for the archive will be determined as much by research need as preservation requirements, and we will be interested to learn from research projects where we might be able to collaborate as part of the pilot development."
Surely there would be something similar in the US?
no subject
It's terrible about the archives. I don't understand the harm of leaving them up even after the station itself ceased to broadcast locally. I don't understand making link rot. It's like disappearing the station.
Surely there would be something similar in the US?
You would think!
(I'm glad the UK has that.)
no subject
Pacifica also has its own archives, which partners with the Radio Preservation Task Force, so hopefully the WBAI archives are not gone, just in some sort of transitory state. They do make their contact info available, so they can be questioned about it.
ETA: And I didn't read to the end of the comments before posting, so I see that lilysea and rosefox already posted the Pacifica info.