ABSTRACT
This chapter explicates the work of the Radio Preservation Task Force of the Library of Congress, a cross-sector public humanities project mandated by the National Recording Preservation Board to promote preservation and access, while expanding the primary source canon for Film and Media Studies. It contends that preservation work is crucial for the maintenance and growth of radio studies as a subdiscipline, and describes how the project was designed to synthesize multiple parallel influences, such as Birmingham School media theory, media historiography, recent scholarship in Information Sciences, and recommendations found in the National Recording Preservation Plan. Preserving historical audio turns out to be a race against time due to decaying formats, a dearth of earmarked funds, and shrinking shelf space to store endangered collections. The only way to preserve crucial alterity history found on obsolete media is by developing a cross-sector coalitional structure, in which the political economy of media preservation is treated as a topic of equal value as conventional humanities research.
