CHAIR: Cynthia Miller

Erwin F. Erhardt

Before Syndicated Television: The Radio Archives of Frederic W. Ziv

Frederic W. Ziv (1905-2001) is well known as the pioneer of syndicated television in the 1950s. He achieved great success in this area, with programs such as Sea Hunt, Highway Patrol, and Bat Masterson. Eventually, several of his series were picked up by network television. However, aside from his notoriety in early television, Ziv had a successful former life in radio. After earning his juris doctorate in law from the University of Michigan, Ziv never pursued the practice of law; instead Ziv produced shows for WLW radio in Cincinnati during the 1930s. In 1937, he formed (with John Sinn) the Frederick Ziv Company—which at first specialized in advertising, but quickly moved into the world of syndicated radio programming. His early radio hits included Boston Blackie, The Cisco Kid, and Easy Acres. By 1947, a reported 675 radio stations were carrying Ziv radio programs. Today, Frederic Ziv’s radio archives are located at the former Voice of America office and transmitter in West Chester, Ohio—just outside of Cincinnati, OH. The museum located inside of this premises is known as the Media Heritage Museum. Aside from Ziv’s archive, it holds other archives pertaining to local and regional radio and television production throughout the 20 the century. This paper will seek to explore and present the holdings of the Ziv archive. While some of the Ziv’s radio programs have been digitalized, others have not. The archive also hold materials relating to marketing of his radio programs, contracts with radio starts and with affiliated radio stations, and other materials. Specifically, it will examine methods utilized to modernize the Ziv archive (digitalization) and the accessibility of the holdings to researchers. In keeping with the theme of the conference, it will provide for a case study of archival use in media history.

James Rodgers

The Kremlin’s Official Secrets and Tales from the TraumaZone: the Politics of Archives and History in late Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia

One of Mikhail Gorbachev’s final acts as leader of the Soviet Union was to hand over to Boris Yeltsin—as the leader of the new Russia, Yeltsin would take over Gorbachev’s offices in the Kremlin—the ‘presidential archive’, secret documents on episodes of Soviet history, passed down from leader to leader since the time of Joseph Stalin. There followed a period in which Russian and foreign researchers were allowed unprecedented access to archives in Moscow. That period is long finished. Drawing on examples from Adam Curtis’ BBC iPlayer series TramaZone (2022), made from ‘tens of thousands of hours of raw footage recorded in Russia’ from 1985-1999 but never before broadcast’, this paper will look at the way that the changing international relations, technology, censorship, and official history of post-Soviet Russia have interacted. One episode of Curtis’ series features the ‘Department of Restricted Books’ in Moscow in the late 1980s. Banned volumes include James Bond novels, and a picture book on the wedding of the British heir to the throne, Prince Charles, to Lady Diana Spencer, in 1981. In a ‘Moscow Diary’ for the Financial Times in January 2023, Max Seddon described shops where, ‘Books by writers labelled “foreign agents”, a black mark equating them with spies, are now sold wrapped in brown paper.’ This paper will conclude by arguing that—now archives are once again intensely political, the Russian state has recognized that, in the contemporary media age, the ‘Department of Restricted Books’ can no longer work: but legislation as a form of censorship has been reimposed. At the same time, changing technology in the form of streaming (offering producers time they would be much less likely to get in the broadcast era) is giving historians and wider audiences access to material that allows a different understanding of the past.

François Dansereau

Archival Fragmentations and Digital Environments: Postcustodial Futures

Digital technology is transforming how the public interacts with archival records and how archival organizations provide access to their collections. This paper presents the theoretical concept of fragmentation as a useful frame of reference to deconstruct knowledge structures and technologies in traditional archival practices and spaces. In parallel, it discusses the development of digital collections and spaces not based on the custody of the records, and outside of the scope of traditional archival institutions. Through an exploration of the theme of postcustodialsm, this paper argues that the future of archives relies on transdisciplinary collaboration oriented toward the erection of digital interfaces and windows of knowledge based on narrative development.  These conversations are necessary to enact transformative practices that allow Indigenous researchers to encounter archival records produced about them by colonial processes and organizations. This paper explores ways to support Indigenous researchers by facilitating access to archival records about Indigenous communities found and dispersed in colonial archives, while noting their importance for Indigenous resurgence. It discusses the close connection between Indigenous research and access to records about them in colonial archives through digital means, while highlighting the reimagination of provenance in the current literature. By acknowledging the limits of access in traditional archival institutions, it highlights the potential of digital platforms controlled by Indigenous researchers and communities. The paper insists on the importance for memory institutions to assess the societal impact of their interventions and the ethics associated with the sharing of information. These reflections are put forward in line with the development of anticolonial strategic orientations at The Archive of the Jesuits in Canada, based on the support for Indigenous resurgence."

Milan Hain

Between Too Much and Too Little: Personal Reflections of a US Film Scholar from Central Europe

Archives determine not only what answers we can get to our research questions, but also what questions we can afford to ask in the first place. This sounds rather obvious, but as a academician from a small central European country whose research focuses on the US film industry, I experience this perhaps more intensely than most of my colleagues. Ever since my doctoral studies, I have preferred archival-based methods of researching the history of US cinema, especially the studio system era, which is challenging to say the least given my institutional affiliation and geographic location. In the proposed paper, I want to focus on my personal experience of researching US film history. Specifically, I will compare two projects of mine that differ fundamentally in their basic characteristics, even though both dealt with Hollywood independent producers. During the research for my doctoral dissertation on the US films of a Czechoslovak native Hugo Haas, I had to do without any centralized archive of his personal or corporate papers. Instead, I had to settle for fragmentary documentation that I obtained from numerous institutions in the USA and Europe. Moreover, I worked on the project at a time when online digital tools such as the Media History Digital Library were not yet available. My follow-up research project on David O. Selznick and his star stable was quite different. During my two research trips to the US, I was able to use the formidably extensive archives of Selznick’s independent production company at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. In addition, I was able to draw further information from contemporary press and other materials made available through various online platforms that have proliferated in recent years. Yet even on this occasion I encountered limitations resulting from my being based in the Czech Republic, thus becoming fully aware of how my proximity to resources (or lack of thereof) largely determines my academic profile."