OAA Board Member To Help Save OETA Material
Lisa Henry – current Vice President of OAA – is headed to Bean Town to help save a vital part of Oklahoma’s television news history and in the process she’s adding a new title to her resume: that of mentor.
The Curator and Head Archivist at the University of Oklahoma’s internationally recognized Julian P. Kanter Political Commercial Archive will travel to Boston only hours after the new year begins to go through several days of immersion training at Boston’s famed WGBH Public Television station.
The training is part of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship, which is designed to connect some of the nation’s best historical preservationists with graduate students to help preserve pieces of local television broadcast history.
That Oklahoma preservation effort will be to digitize and save scores of Oklahoma Education Television Authority nightly news program broadcasts. The broadcasts are currently on a variety of aging videotape formats.
The fellowship provides funding for a computer workstation for the graduate student to transfer the broadcast materials. Henry will oversee the graduate student “fellow” and transfer effort at OU.
Over the course of the Fellowship, each fellow will inventory, digitize, and catalog a small collection of audiovisual media; generate technical and preservation metadata; and process the digital files for ingest into the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.
Dr. Susan Burke, associate professor of Library and Information Studies will be the faculty representative on the project.