KMUW and The American Archive of Public Broadcasting to Preserve Historic Public Television and Radio Programs from Across Kansas

Two-year Kansas Public Media Preservation Project is funded with $407,000 grant
from The Council on Library and Information Resources

BOSTON (February 11, 2020) – KMUW 89.1 – FM and The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) announced today a collaborative effort to preserve and make accessible historic television and radio programs produced by Kansas public media stations. The resulting online collection, to be digitized from deteriorating and obsolete formats, will showcase statewide coverage of social issues, commentary, public reporting and history from more than 60 years of Kansas public media archival collections. The two-year Kansas Public Media Preservation Project is made possible by a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources.

“We couldn’t be more thrilled to have this opportunity to quite literally rescue a unique record of Kansas history and make it available for all to explore,” said Debra Fraser, KMUW General Manager. “The Kansas Public Media Preservation Project will culminate in an unprecedented audio-visual record of local response to national issues and state-specific news, culture and art from our nation’s heartland.”

The Kansas collection consists of programs produced by KMUW, High Plains Public Radio, KPR, KPTS, KRPS, KHCC and Vietnamese Public Radio. Largely unseen and unheard since they were first broadcast, the programs risk deterioration on obsolete magnetic media, which must be digitized before physical degradation makes preservation impossible.

These programs will be the first from Kansas contributed to the AAPB, a collaboration between the Library of Congress and Boston public media producer WGBH. Over the course of the Kansas Public Media Preservation Project, the participating stations will provide digitized copies of more than 3,000 programs to be preserved in the Library of Congress and made accessible by WGBH on the AAPB website at americanarchive.org.

“With this new collection, we can fill a gap in the AAPB’s geographic representation, making content from Kansas public media archives available for all to access,” said Alan Gevinson, Ph.D., AAPB project director at the Library of Congress. “Scholars, educators and the public will now be able to view and listen to decades of local stories on important civil rights cases, tumultuous weather, industry shakeups and more.”
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About WMUW 89.1 FM

KMUW 89.1-FM is a 24/7 news and community organization, broadcasting from WSU Old Town at 121 N. Mead in Wichita, Kansas. KMUW is a service of Wichita State University and has been serving the community for over 70 years.

About the American Archive of Public Broadcasting
The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) is a collaboration between the Library of Congress and the WGBH Educational Foundation to coordinate a national effort to preserve at-risk public media before its content is lost to posterity and provide a central web portal for access to the unique programming that public stations have aired over the past 70 years. To date, over 100,000 digital files of television and radio programming contributed by more than 100 public media organizations and archives across the United States have been preserved and made accessible for long-term preservation and access. The entire collection is available on location at the Library of Congress and WGBH, and more than 51,000 files are available online at americanarchive.org.