Preserve this Podcast!
A two-year grant to teach podcast preservation
Dearest podcast community,
(If you want to cut to the chase, see the official announcement for this project on the Bytegeist Blog: Preserve this Podcast!)
Five years ago, I thought that the best way to combine my love of listening to podcasts and my education to become an archivist was to create a podcast about archives. Over ten shows, I flailed about trying to get good acoustics in my cold office with a crappy microphone, find music that was actually interesting on Free Music Archive, think up new content, and try to produce shows fairly regularly. I was so relieved when we decided to put the podcast on (then) hiatus (which, as it often does, became permanent sleep). And a few months ago, I took down the podcast feed entirely because I was tired of paying $5 a month. (Taking down the podcast feed also gave me a great screen shot to share in presentations at archival conferences like the Midwest Archives Conference.)
In the years since we stopped producing Sound of the Archives, I’ve still been an avid listener to podcasts. I continued to try and combine the archivist in me and the listener in me. I started the Audio Signal newsletter with a dream of sharing archival audio, as well as podcasts. But the Audio Signal thankfully formed into this (Bello) collective of people much smarter than me so we could share and write about podcasts together.
Through this I started to realize my mistake: it wasn’t at all about marketing and sharing cool archival audio, or teaching archivists how to produce a podcast, or dreaming up playlists of “podcasts that make good use of archival audio.” Archivists didn’t need to make podcasts. Archivists didn’t need to even be on podcasts. Archivists needed to do what they do best: preserve podcasts.
Thankfully, I found folks who felt similarly. We got together to teach a workshop at the Personal Digital Archiving conference, targeting an audience of indie producers. It went great — shout out to the producer who told ushe labels his interviews “use this one.wav” because I love that example — but it was mostly filled with other archivists (who are lovely! we love them too!).
The workshop propelled us in the next few months to dream bigger and better. And that results of those dreams are what I want to share with you today:
I am so, so excited to announce that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded The Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) $142,000 towards the mission of helping independent podcasters protect their work against the threats of digital decay. Working over the course of two years, we get to create a podcast (very meta) that will teach preservation and an accompanying zine to follow along. We will also be traveling to multiple podcast conferences around the country to teach workshops to indie producers.
I have the honor of working alongside Mary Kidd from the New York Public Library and Molly Schwartz, from METRO’s Library Bytegeist. More about them as well as much more information about the project can be found on METRO’s The Bytegeist Blog: Preserve this Podcast!
Love, and in preservation solidarity,
Dana, co-editor and co-founder of Bello
The Bello Collective is a publication + newsletter about podcasts and the audio industry. Our goal is to bring together writers, journalists, and other voices who share a passion for the world of audio storytelling.
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