Radio archives from Caribbean and diasporic communities have recently received support for digitization. This is significant both because radio has been and continues to be the most widely consumed medium in the region since the mid-twentieth century, and digitization has until now been a rare occurrence. These archives begin to demonstrate the range and diversity of programming and listening practices in the region and its diasporas; they will allow students, scholars, and wider publics to recover and analyze a richer understanding of mid to late 20^th century Caribbean and Caribbean-US history.

This article surveys the work of archivists, librarians, and technicians in three distinct projects. Laura Wagner introduces the Radio Haiti Archive Project, housed at Duke University, which has digitized and described thousands of hours of interviews and programming created by Haiti’s first independent radio station, Radio Haïti-Inter, and its charismatic and influential director, Jean Dominique, from the early 1970s until 2003. Writing from the Latin American Library at Tulane University, Christine Hernández recounts current grant-supported digitization efforts for a collection of over a hundred Spanish language radio dramas, informationals, and comedy programs produced in Miami, Florida during the late 1960s. Finally, Sharon E. Farb shares work from UCLA, where the International Digital Ephemera Program (https://idep.library.ucla.edu/) has collaborated with Cuba’s Instituto de Historia (http://www.ihc.cu/) in a preservation and digitization project for Universidad del Aire, a widely popular program that offered educational programs and interviews with many prominent politicians, journalists, writers and artists. Before we discuss these projects in more detail below, we address the broader significance of these activites and consider their potential to contribute to classroom curricula and experiences as well as the ways they afford us a more diverse and expansive conceptualization of radio histories.

Giving students the opportunity to listen to radio programming, rather than merely reading about it, is essential to their understanding of how media works. To give their attention to distinct intonations, impassioned oratory, or the dimensions of race and class in their sonic components makes for a richer experience, which they will process intellectually and perhaps more personally. Given the media-saturated lives they lead, it is important to historicize and contextualize their experiences and think about how media has shaped people’s lives in ways both similar and different to their own. In addition, as our classrooms become increasingly multi-lingual and diverse, the introduction of radio programming in Spanish, French or Kreyòl has the potential to both connect first- or second- generation migrants to languages and cultures they are familiar with and introduce American students to the array of radio practices and cultures of the Americas. While radio archives within the United States have been increasingly recognized and cared for, those from the Caribbean less so. But their existence is paradigm shifting, and it opens our ears to a tremendously significant cultural practice in the Americas. These are important tools through and with which to think about diversity, both in the classroom and beyond, with regards to the forms of media that shape people’s lives, and in coming to terms with how institutional power determines the very archives through which we comprehend the past.

Radio Haiti Archive

The Radio Haiti Archive, housed at the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, comprises more than 5300 recordings on nearly 1700 reel-to-reel audio tapes, more than 2000 audio cassette tapes, and approximately 80 linear feet of papers from Radio Haïti-Inter, Haiti’s first and most prominent independent radio station. It represents a singular archive of late 20th-century Haitian history. In addition to recording major events, it contains granular, real-time reporting on the country’s changing political, social, and cultural landscape over more than three decades, from the Duvalier dictatorship through the country’s turbulent transition to democracy. In keeping with Radio Haiti’s mission to represent the Haitian majority who had long been excluded from public discourse, our primary goal was to provide wide access and digitally repatriate the collection to Haiti.

The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the project two Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grants to fund the digitization and description of the entire Radio Haiti collection: "Voices of Change: Preserving Radio Haiti" (2015) for $201,948, and Voices of Change II: Bringing Radio Haiti Home" (2017) for $85,753. In 2017, Duke Libraries also received a Recordings at Risk grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) for the "Radio Haiti Open Reel Audio Tape: Intensive Remediation Project" for $15,889, which funded the restoration and digitization of the eighty-eight most damaged Radio Haiti reels, which suffered from mold, sticky-shed syndrome, and other types of deterioration. The Cutting Corporation (now known as Graphic Audio, LLC) remediated and digitized the vast majority of the Radio Haiti tapes; the eighty-eight most damaged tapes were restored and digitized by the Northeast Document Conservation Center.

One of Radio Haiti’s open reels, before and after remediation. Radio Haiti regularly used and reused whatever tape they could find, in this case a Deutsche Welle reel. Photo: Aaron Coe of Graphic Audio

The Radio Haiti Archive project was fortunate to be based at a relatively well-funded special collections library at a private US university. Generous external funding allowed for the costly preservation and digitization of the materials as well as paying the salary of a full-time archivist with the necessary subject and language expertise for four years. Were it not for these factors, the Radio Haiti Archive project could never have been fully digitized with trilingual narrative description for each and every recording (in Haitian Creole, French, and English) – in other words, we could not have ensured that ordinary Haitian audiences would have access to the archive.

Even with the considerable privileges the Radio Haiti Archive enjoyed, there were tensions between the needs of the collection and the existing conventions of a US academic library. Duke had never before taken on an audio project of this scope, had never before created detailed trilingual metadata, and had never before designed an archive primarily for non-Anglophone, non-academic audiences. The Duke Digital Repository is a valuable but imperfect tool for this kind of collection. Bringing Radio Haiti back to life – and back to Haiti – meant continually rethinking and shifting the library’s standard practices and expectations.

Louis J. Boeri and Minín Bujones Boeri Collection of Cuban American Radionovelas

From his studios on the fifth floor of the Freedom Tower in Miami, Florida, Louis J. Boeri and his company of writers, performers, and technicians at America's Productions, Inc. (API) forged a radio programming empire, distributing their products to over 200 radio stations in Latin America and Spain, to Spanish-language radio stations in the United States, and to the US government.  With scripts penned by acclaimed Cuban and Mexican scriptwriters, API produced entertainment-centered programs that included radionovelas (Spanish for radio soap operas), comedies, advice programs, biblical dramas, mysteries, spy stories, and variety shows between 1963 and 1970.

Figure 2. Portrait of Louis J. Boeri in his office at America’s Production Inc., c. 1960s. Collection 38(44), Image Archive, the Latin American Library.

In 2004, the Latin American Library at Tulane University acquired API’s extant library of master audio recordings of its entertainment programming and some associated print and photographic materials to form the Louis J. Boeri and Minín Bujones Boeri Collection of Cuban American Radionovelas (hereafter referred to as the Radionovelas Collection).  The bulk of this collection (570 linear feet) consists of over 3,600 hours of audio programs recorded on magnetic 1/4" reel-to-reel polyester audio tape on 7” reels.  The total number of reels in the collection numbers 8,934, representing 135 program titles and their constituent episodes.  Supplementary to the audio materials is 12 linear feet of marketing reports, promotional brochures, catalogs, ephemera, photographs, VHS tapes, 16mm film, DVDs, and newspaper clippings.

The challenges associated with the long-term preservation and access to this large collection of aged reel-to-reel tapes created for radio are multifold. They involve:

1. the physical condition of the tapes; 
2. the obsolescence of playback equipment and availability of technical expertise; 
3. the digital conversion process;  
4. the determination of copyright holders;
5. the costly process of conversion from analog to digital format.

In 2014, the Latin American Library began to address these challenges with a series of steps that led to two successful bids at securing needed external funding to digitize one third of the collection.

Audio tape is an inherently unstable carrier.  Polyester magnetic audio tape has a 50-year life span.  The API tapes date well beyond this limit and are in a more fragile state due to mold and a range of tape pack issues (curling, cinching, and popped strands) that arise from poor storage conditions. The Radionovelas reels currently reside in the University's offsite storage facility where the storage environment is kept to an average temperature of 68°F and an average humidity of 40%. This improved environment slows the deterioration of the tapes, but does not arrest it, nor reverse it.  Cleaning the tapes and reels, remediating mold, and repairing breaks must be done prior to running the tapes through a playback machine.

Crucial to the long-term preservation and access to these unique materials is the creation of digital surrogates.  Because our library lacks the necessary playback equipment, labor, and expertise to digitize audio tapes on the scale needed for the Radionovelas Collection, we knew early on that this part of process would need to be outsourced to a trusted vendor. Additional to the cost of hiring a vendor were the shipping expenses for transporting the materials safely and securely. To finance the digitization of only a portion of these tapes, the LAL sought external funding. 

The question of copyright became essential to resolve at this early stage as well.  In the case of the Radionovelas recordings, we knew they were produced in the late 1960s and that their production involved numerous potential creators who could all be copyright holders.  Also, no known documentation exists from America’s Productions, Inc. to clarify any intellectual property agreements API employees may have had with the company regarding their contributions to the programs.  Establishing the copyright status of the radionovelas recordings was an essential preparation step toward pursuing outside funding for digitization that would almost certainly require free and open access to derivative files.  The LAL’s Director and Curator of Special Collections worked with Tulane’s Office of Counsel General and sought the advice of expert IP lawyers, law professors, and archivists over an eight-month period to clarify the copyright status of these materials and to identify any titles that are likely to involve copyright holders beyond Tulane University.  

In 2015, the Latin American Research Resources Project (LARRP), part of the Global Resources initiatives of the Center for Research Libraries, awarded the LAL $8,768 to conduct a pilot project to convert 160 of the Radionovelas reels.  The goals included:  1) understanding the range of condition issues present among the audio reels that would impact the cost of digital conversion (necessary information to estimate conversion cost for all the tapes); 2) identifying a reputable and trusted vendor to conduct the digitization; 3) developing a workflow for processing audio materials, converting them to digital, creating metadata, and managing the derivatives as components of an archival collection; and 4) creating and publishing web-ready files of print and audio items from the Radionovelas Collection in a digital collection via the Tulane University Digital Library, thus providing public access to the digitized radionovelas programs.

Figure 3. Screenshot of the landing page for La Hora Trece. The Louis J. Boeri and Minín Bujones Boeri Collection of Cuban American Radionovelas digital collection, Tulane University Digital Library.

The results of the pilot project included: 1) identifying George Blood L.P. as our trusted digitization vendor; 2) with the funds awarded, we converted 194 reels that adequately sampled the condition extremes observed; 3) we derived the needed estimates for digitizing entire program titles and obtained what we needed to develop a long term plan for fund raising to convert the entire collection; 4) we created and tested workflows within the LAL and with other library units involved in the workflows required to take digital files from delivery to publication in an online collection within an acceptable timeframe; and 5) we learned to improve our digital object metadata with additional fields and to create link ready metadata files.

After the success of the pilot, we felt ready to plan a larger project.  In 2017, The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) awarded the LAL $229,189 to carry-out a two-year project to digitize one-third of the total number of radionovelas audio tapes (36 programs in their entirety contained on 2,508 reels, 3,076 episodes, 1,281 hours of programming) in order to make an even larger portion of the collection accessible.  The nominated reels were cleaned and rehoused prior to digitization. We hired an assistant archivist to work solely on the project helping the PIs to coordinate shipping, perform file review, and create metadata. The LAL team successfully completed its CLIR project at the end of 2019. The newly expanded online collection contains 23 program titles in their entirety, 12 storylines for the two continuing series (El Agente Secreto and La Hora de Misterio), and 13 titles with sample episodes.

The UCLA Library’s International Digital Ephemera Program[1] supported by the Arcadia Fund[2] and UCLA Library includes Cuba’s Instituto de Historia’s (IHC’s) collection of Universidad del Aire (University of the Air), an educational radio show that aired in Cuba between 1949–1960. Each episode presented a different topic or discipline, showcasing Cuban intellectuals and cultural figures. The program was supplemented with a printed magazine, Cuadernos del Universidad del Aire, that was issued monthly and was available for purchase by listeners of the show. There are significant preservation challenges to making this content publicly available. According to Yasmin Dessem, UCLA Library’s Head of Audiovisual Preservation, “one of the most challenging audio formats we’ve had to digitize this past year has been radio transcription discs, a type of lacquer disc historically used to record radio broadcasts. Lacquer discs look similar to vinyl discs but are exceptionally fragile. Their unstable nitrocellulose coatings are prone to cracking and delamination, which occurs when the recording surface starts to shed in pieces.”[3]

The UCLA Library’s collaboration and partnership with IHC along with our other partners around the world represents a cooperative approach for research libraries that is built on a partnership model to address the at-risk nature of the historical and cultural record in modern times. As part of IDEP, the team[4] at UCLA developed a multilingual toolkit[5] to support the work of the partners that continues to be developed and is in use for UCLA’s newer Modern Endangered Archive Program[6], also supported by Arcadia. The UCLA IDEP model is designed to address the critical need to preserve born digital content and collections and to digitize the ephemera that documents everyday life around the world to give an accurate version of the scholarly and historical record. One distinguishing feature of IDEP is that as soon as partners receive equipment and training and supplies the day-to-day work to reformat and describe the at-risk ephemera can begin and is accomplished by the partners such as IHC. Our partners select the content and collections most important to them and their constituents for digitization and UCLA hosts the content while our partners receive a copy of all digitized content. This aspect of the collaboration centers on a post-custodial post-colonial model and seeks to build capacity with each partner by bringing equipment, supplies and staff training and by UCLA developing a multilingual toolkit designed to address each partner’s specific needs.

Author Biographies

Sharon E. Farb is Associate University Librarian for Distinctive Collections and the Chief Policy Strategist at the UCLA Library.

Alejandra Bronfman is Professor in the Department of Latin American, Caribbean and Latina/o Studies at the University at Albany-SUNY.

Laura Wagner was the Radio Haiti Project Archivist at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library from 2015 to 2019. She is currently writing a book about Radio Haiti and its legacy.

Christine Hernández is Curator of Special Collections at The Latin American Library (LAL), Tulane University. She is responsible for the organization, cataloging, preservation, and access to the LAL’s rare books, manuscripts, Image Archive, maps, and ephemeral materials. She recently published, "Digital Resources: Tulane University’s Collection of Cuban American Radionovelas, 1963–1970," for the online resource, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.933.

1. https://idep.library.ucla.edu ↑

2. https://www.arcadiafund.org.uk/ ↑

3. https://www.library.ucla.edu/blog/preservation/2017/05/31/preserving-radio-broadcasts-in-cuba ↑

4. * The team of UCLA librarians, archivists, and staff who worked on the International Digital Ephemera Project included: Kristian Allen, Dawn Aveline, Nora Avetyan, Ruby Bell-Gam, Pete Broadwell, Phil Chang, Dawn Childress, Yasmin Dessem, Sharon E. Farb, Parinita Ghorpade, Todd Grappone, David Hirsch, Claudia Horning, Kip Hannan, Alin James, Cathy Martyniak, Rosalie Lack, Lisa McAulay, Chela (Consuela) Metzger, Jennifer Osorio, T-Kay Sangwand, and Allie Whalen. ↑

5. https://uclalibrary.github.io/ideptoolkit/ ↑

6. https://www.library.ucla.edu/partnerships/modern-endangered-archives-program ↑