IASA 2018 Annual Conference

Last year at IASA 2017 in Berlin, University of Michigan Professors Kelly Askew and Paul Conway presented a status report on a research project designed to explore access options for a collection of 900 radio programs and scripts representing 40 years of broadcasting of Voice of America’s Music Time in Africa (1965-2005). The NEH funded project ends in May 2018, affording an opportunity to showcase preservation and access options for this important collection of radio broadcasts to the African continent. The paper has two sections. First, the presentation demonstrates a custom-designed interface to the collection that is preserved digitally in an enterprise-grade digital repository and streaming service. The primary question in this section concerns the value added by custom access system programming and how the system might be generalized for other collections of sound recordings with associated documentary evidence. Second, the paper exposes some initial findings on the content of the 900 radio programs afforded by the existence of digitized scripts with searchable text, along with metadata that supports geospatial and temporal mapping of the content of the radio programs. The primary question in this section concerns the feasibility of associating Voice of America programming with political, social, and economic activity in a selection of Sub-Saharan nations. The research effort points toward new ways to explore the impact of radio programming in post-colonial Africa.