The Radio Central Museum on San Francisco Bay’s Alameda Island is a landmark for any radio enthusiast, and its parent organization, the California Historical Radio Society, was named a recipient of a new preservation grant.
The Library of American Broadcasting Foundation announced four recipients of its inaugural LABF Preservation Grants. Each will receive a grant of $2,500 to be used to preserve specific elements of broadcast history.
Recipients were selected based on high scores in historical significance, preservation methodology, feasibility, public accessibility and their overall contribution to the field, LABF Co-Chair Deborah Parenti said in a release.
The California Historical Radio Society
The CHRS is dedicated to preserving, interpreting and sharing the history of radio, broadcasting and electronic communication in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.
Its Radio Central Museum is located on Alameda Island on San Francisco Bay. Inside the 125-year-old telephone building, the CHRS is creating a center that it said is unique to the west coast, with artifacts from the late 1890s through the 1980s on display. CHRS raised more than $1 million to purchase the building.
The LABF grant will be used to preserve and expand access to the Bay Area Radio Museum and Hall of Fame’s historically significant audio archives, which document years of broadcasting that shaped Bay Area and California cultural life. The Hall of Fame shares a home inside the Radio Central Museum, but many of its numerous exhibits are online at its website.
CHRS also operates amateur radio station W6CF.
Society to Preserve and Encourage Radio Drama, Variety and Comedy
Since 1974, SPERDVAC has been dedicated to collecting, restoring and sharing the recordings of classic radio programs from the 1930s through the early 1960s. The LABF grant will be used to equip a new restoration volunteer to join the restoration team and increase the society’s capacity to restore and share its content.
TCMediaNow
Twin Cities Media Now is a nonprofit organization whose mission statement is for the preservation, digitization and long-term stewardship of historically significant broadcast television and film materials. LABF’s grant will be used to support the group’s efforts to stabilize, digitize and provide long-term public access to the professional video and film archive of Stan Turner, a legendary Twin Cities broadcaster and Minnesota Broadcast Hall of Fame member.
WHRO Public Media
Based in Hampton Roads, Va., WHRO will use the LABF Preservation Grant to preserve a collection of materials from its earliest days of delivering educational content to schools in the Virginia tidewater region.
The collection includes 20 hours of media that are at risk of degradation due to obsolete media formats. Funds will go toward the digitization of these materials, metadata creation and ingesting them into WHRO’s digital asset management system for future access.
In addition to the monetary award, grant recipients will be both honored as LABF Preservation Ambassadors on the Foundation’s website and be recognized on-site during LABF’s Giants of Broadcasting and Electronic Arts Gala Luncheon at Gotham Hall in New York City on Nov. 17.
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