The Center for Radio Preservation and Archives at WYSO
The Center for Radio Preservation and Archives at WYSO embodies one of the station's guiding principles: preservation as a form of public service. In practice, that means preserving the “records of conversations, cultural events, news, and decisions that shape our station, our community, and sometimes the world.”
How the Center does that is reflected in the variety of initiatives that live under its wide preservationist umbrella:
The WYSO Archives
The WYSO Archives houses radio programs, recordings, and other station-related media created since WYSO’s first broadcast on February 8, 1958, to the present.
In the collection are nearly 5,000 obsolete and at-risk audio assets, including open-reel tapes, cassettes, and hundreds of CDs, carts, mini disks, Digital Audio Tapes (DATs), floppy disks and other media. In 2009, the station began to catalog and digitize this collection when we were chosen to take part in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) pilot project. That work began in collaboration with Deanna Ulvestad, former archivist at Greene County Public Library, and was made possible by a grant from The Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
About 300 hours of the ¼” open-reel tapes have been digitized so far, and are accessible online through AAPB, which will eventually house the entire collection. A Mellon grant to AAPB will enable the Center for Radio Preservation and Archives to digitize and archive an additional 1300 locally produced open-reel tapes. The DATs and cassettes have been digitized in-house.
The Archives also houses over 240,000 born digital assets created over the past several decades, along with the hundreds of files now being created every day. The Center is planning to implement a Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) to organize and care for this part of the collection for future accessibility.
In addition to the audio material, the WYSO Archives contain more than 500 photographs chronicling the station’s history, along with negatives, slides, posters, program guides going back to the first day of operation, news clippings, videos, awards, bumper stickers, t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs. The program guide collection is an especially rich historical resource for researchers and staff.
Click here to read about the history of the WYSO Archives, written by volunteer Andy Valeri as part of his master’s research at the University of Dayton .
Civil Rights Oral History Project
The Yellow Springs Civil Rights Oral History Collection is composed of more than 50 interviews with area elders. Content from that collection is used to produce the series Loud as the Rolling Sea. The series is stewarded by Dr. Kevin McGruder, Antioch College history professor, Community Voices producer, and member of the Miami Valley Public Media governing board and the HBCU Radio Preservation Project advisory board.
Rediscovered Radio
The Rediscovered Radio series, created in 2013 by Center director Jocelyn Robinson, draws on material contained in the WYSO Archives. She is also coproducer, with WYSO Music Director Juliet Fromholt, of the podcast Women’s Voices, Women’s Music in the WYSO Archives, which launched in 2024. WYSO is a national leader in using historical material in content creation.
HBCU Radio Preservation Project (HBCU RPP)
What we’ve learned growing and developing the WYSO Archives informs the HBCU Radio Preservation Project (HBCU RPP), now in its 4-year implementation phase. The HBCU RPP works with radio stations and institutional archives on the campuses of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) to preserve radio material produced by the stations in the past, present, and future. The aim is to instill an ethos of preservation among HBCU radio stations and their campus archives and create a replicable model that can serve not only HBCUs, but ultimately any college radio station, tribal stations, rural stations, and other public and community stations.
Looking Ahead
In 2025 WYSO will be moving to a new home in the renovated historic Union Schoolhouse in Yellow Springs. The Center for Radio Preservation and Archives will have a dedicated and publicly accessible archives space there, which will also be used to conduct workshops and other public programs related to radio preservation.
For more information about the Center for Radio Preservation and Archives at WYSO, contact Jocelyn Robinson at jrobinson@wyso.org.
