Ms. Mcauliffe national and International Outreach is a newly created division of the library of congress that pulls together into one unit, all of the externally facing programs of the library. We started on october 1, so we are at startup mode at this point. The library is delighted to host todays session and sees this conference as an important step in the library punish mission of helping to preserve americas cultural mission. Staff members tell me the near includes canada and that the far includes australia. That is quite a span. There are around 100 organizations represented, with many more individual serving as Research Associates for this project. We at the library of congress are genuinely grateful for all the enthusiasm, planning, and the effort that has brought this about. We knew that radio has played a vital role in the last 100 years of our history. There are more than 14,000 radio stations in the United States. From the mid1920s until the 1950s, radio was the preeminent source for entertainment and news information. It was an irreplaceable part of our socioCultural Heritage and a key part of our social memory. Many libraries and archives have acquired recordings, but there have been few systematic efforts to collect commercial Radio Broadcasting and document and preserve the entire range of broadcast in public and private collection. Luckily, now there is an initiative to preserve public radio and television. That still leaves the vast expanse of commercial and independent nonprofit radio that is found at the national and local levels. As you all know much better than i do, radio preservation presents unique challenges. The magnitude of the material produced and its ephemeral nature. So much was never captured, or if recorded, has disappeared due to neglect. Ownership of radio itself has changed frequently, especially following deregulation in the 1990s and preservation efforts have suffered. The library of congress released the national sound bank that produced several influential reports as well as a landmark study in 2010. One of the 80 or so recommendations found in the plan was a charge to establish a subcommittee to develop strategies and tools to collect and preserve radio broadcast content. It went on to say, and i quote, among the subcommittees pot first action should be the convening of a symposium subcommittees first action should be the convening of a symposium. Well, here we are, and i hope this will be a productive day for all of you. Thank you very much for being here. [applause] mr. Sterling as is often true of people who have the desk in the building, jane will have to move on and do library things. Three people have been the primary players in putting this together. Is josh shepherd in the room . Wave your hand again. [applause] i think the real name of this operation is joshs army. A lot of you are here because of josh. The majority of you are here for his effort in pulling together researchers from arod the country and beginning to get the Radio Preservation Task force off the ground. The third person, and there are many others. Their acknowledgments are towards the end of the program. The third person who has been the program head, the program director, is michelle helms. I should note about michelle and josh and me. We all share a madison, wisconsin, background. [applause] josh and i both got our doctorates in madison, admittedly a few years apart. Michelle retired just last year, i think, and you had been there two decades . A little more. Has just retired, and i am talking with michelle because i need to learn about that retirement thing, which i have not done very well. I am at g. W. And taught for a period of 35 years. Thought i was retired and was asked by the dean to come back as an associate dean. Its about time to hang this up. This gets overdone. As you will see, over the coming two days we have put together a very eclectic program with a lot people coming from very different parts of the industry. Where we are like and dont have enough people, though we tried, is more people from the commercial side of the business. We have lots of people in public broadcasting. Hooray. That is great and important. We dont have a look from the commercial side. A lot of that is deregulation, changing ownership of the station. The first thing the owner does when walking in the door is chuck the history because they cannot figure out how to monetize it. If we had been sitting in this room and doing what we are doing two decades ago, just before the 1996 telecommunication act, i think we would have had a better chance of finding things which sadly, since then, have disappeared. Let me turn this over to introduce our keynote speaker. Let me turn this over to michelle. Michelle . [applause] ms. Hilmes so nice to see the people in this room, because it has been a long process of bringing people together, emailing. I feel i have communicated with everyone in this room. I dont know what you look like. Thank you for being here. I want to say thanks so much to josh, whose efforts have pulled this conference together in so many ways. I think that chris tends to be modest about his own role and competence. I have to say, and i am sure most of you know this, that talk about someone who wrote the bible on american broadcasting history. Stay tuned. How many of us have that on our shelves . Im sure the vast majority. Also bringing us here. I dont want to throw these words Like Washington insider around lightly, but you have certainly been here. [laughter] here you are heading up the task force. Am i allowed to Say Something about the National RecordingPreservation Board and your new position as director . [applause] anyway, it is really a fortuitous coming together of so many things. I will introduce our speaker in a moment because i know we want to get to this, but thank all of you. This program is your effort. All the people who are on the task force, program committee, put together workshops, submitted papers, agreed to chair caucuses. Thank you all for doing this. I am looking forward to seeing what comes out of the next few days. When we were thinking about a keynote speaker at the conference, and we are delighted to have so many keynote speakers, we all agreed immediately that we could not think of a person we would rather invite to be our opening let me try that again, our opening keynote address speaker then professor paddy scannell. He was one of the pioneers of radio studies and media history. He is a great influence on my own work. In the early 90s when i was starting to write about american broadcasting history, i was looking for a model. It was his book which came out in 1991 which was a huge influence. This is the kind of history that i want to write. I want to say it is the kind of history that all of us here today would say it is why we are here. It is a book that said radio history or broadcasting history is not just about the march of networks, not just about business tightening, not just about technology, but its about the way that broadcasting has become integral and into the dna of our culture, our society, of our lives, everyday experience. It is what makes radio such an integral part of our Cultural Heritage and why it has grown to be what it is. We are finally getting recognition that it is so preserved to be studying this medium that we are studying today. We are finally beginning to preserve it. I give patty complete credit for this whole thing. I really do. It was a wonderful book. He has done more, which i will explain in a moment. Paddy scannell joined the department of communication at the university of michigan in 2006. He had already spent 30 years building one of the first undergraduate degree in media studies in the u. K. At the university of westminster, london. He is a Founding Editor of the journal of media, culture, and society which began publication in 1979 and is still going strong. His works not only include a social history of british broadcasting, but another one, broadcast talk. It is an edited volume that came out in the 1990s. It is a compilation of work. Radio, what is it . It is talk. What kind of talk . Very influential book. Another one, Radio Television and modern life in 1996, which theorized the way media is integrated into the structure of everyday life. Some people, having done all that, would be slowing down. In the early 2000s, patty announced that he was about to embark upon a trilogy of new works, three works that build upon each other, and by gosh, he has done it. The third is underway. The first volume came out 2007 was hailed as a magisterial overview of the development of thinking about the media from the 1930s to the present day. The second volume, television and the meaning of life, came out in 2014 and it has been called a brilliant and provocative look that enriches and deepens our understanding of the central role of broadcasting. The third volume has the provocative title, love and communication. I am anxiously waiting for that would. Someone wrote a book called sex and television. What was it called . Sex and broadcasting. That is a catchy title. I think that love and communication maybe more so. Given his pioneering leadership in the field, there is no one better suited to open our conference this week and then paddy scannell. Please welcome him. [applause] prof. Scannell [laughter] thank you very much, michelle, for that wonderful, if not slightly intimidating introduction. I am already beginning to feel that i am a hard act to follow. [laughter] all i can say, people, is i will give it a go. One of the things that i loved many years ago, when you get invited to do Something Like this, is always check the small print. I got an invitation about 30 years ago to give a keynote in italy at the invitation of the italian public broadcaster, rai. They said it is a conference about radio documentary. I said, yeah, i can do that. I did know something about radio documentary. Until i actually got there, and the evening before i was about to stand up to do what im about to do now, they said, you know, its about the shortform documentary, dont you . No, i didnt. And actually, id never even heard of shortform documentary. I thought it was going to be talking about what i do know about, the beginnings of what i think we would have to call longform documentary. This is a gathering from all over europe of people working in radio were particularly interested in a new, off on avantgarde genre of 90second documentary. [laughter] i found myself saying, i am privileged to be talking to you about the shortform documentary and, im going to start with the longform documentary. [laughter] i went on from there. You may be wondering what that has to do with today. When i bumped into josh, you know, who along with michelle kindly invited me to come and do this, i bumped into him about 6 00 yesterday evening and i said, high, josh, we chatted a bit. I said, by the way, i am only talking for 20 minutes, or type . And he looks at me and says, no, no, youre talking for 45 minutes. I had again that sinking feeling. [laughter] check the small print. What i want to say, folks, is that this, i had produced, if you would like, a shortform talk only to discover that i was doing a longform talk. So if there are lots of pauses and meaningful silences [laughter] i hope you will forgive me. On the good side of this, we might finish a bit earlier than usual, which is not a characteristic feature of events like this. With that in mind, let me start. I assume that all of us i think i am speaking to, as it were, three audiences. Im talking to people interested in and working in archives, sound archives, i am talking to people working in radio and in the radio industry, and i am talking to colleagues like myself who have a long time passion for the study of Radio Broadcasting. As i see it, what i want to talk about, hopefully are the things that unite us all. Michelle mentioned that my third book is indeed going to be called love and communication, and i am assuming that what all of us have in common is a love of radio. It always occurs to me to say, yes, i love radio, and it never occurs to me to say i love television. I found myself thinking about why that might be. I partially hope that in terms of what i have to say about radio, is that it might explain what it right mean to say, as i think we do, that we love radio. What it is about radio that has this distinctive and special quality. What i want to talk about our two related things that, as it were, bring us together at this occasion. As for the question of radio itself, i will try to address the question of what is radio as such, and in relation to this, the underlying question of the sound archive and the question of the recording of radio. Much of what i have to say is about what i am doing now, namely, talking. What you are doing now, namely, listening to me and hearing me. I would like to start on reflecting on the intimate relationship on hearing and listening. They are not the same thing. We say things like it is not the same thing to say i hear the radio as it is to say i listen to the radio. It is not the same thing to say that i see the television and i watch television. They are different, but related things. When we say i hear the radio, i think what that means is in ordinary usage that i have come into the house and i realized that i left the radio on and i hear the radio as i come in. It is not the same as listening. But what i do think, and what underlies much of what i have to say is that what we listen to in radio is what people are saying. We listen to the content of their speech. What we hear and what you are hearing now as you are listening to what i am saying, what you are hearing is my voice. It is these two things that are intimately connected in the power of radio as a medium and the experience of listening. I will be exploring the relationship between hearing and listening in relation to radio itself. Then i want to reflect on, again, what it is that we hear when we listen to recordings of radio programs. I will also be speaking to, and michelle has suggested, historical radio. British and american. In what i think of as the classic, or the golden era of radio, before television came along and displaced it as the dominant, taken for granted medium in everyday life for whole populations as it was for the people of america and britain in the 1930s and the 1940s. It begins to be superseded by television in the postwar decade. So, my overall theme is what i shall be trying to reflect on, the gift of the archive and the meaning of the gift, which invites us to think about that which is given and given by and large and by virtue of its gift, is very largely taken for granted by us when we listen to the radio and hear the voices that speak to us and also that sing to us and for us. Im going to start wh the experience of listening to the radio. Im going to take as my beginning point the thought of some radio listeners back in 1942, here in the United States, and their experience of listening to a very famous american broadcaster, kate smith. I am taking the data for what i have to say from a book that i am sure all academic historians already broadcasting have read, Robert Martins classic mass persuasion, which was, as many of you will know, a study of the impact and effect of a marathon broadcast by kate smith, probably the most famous radio singer of her time in american broadcasting. Over the course of a very long day, she came to the microphone every 15 minutes for 16 hours or more to talk to listeners and to urge them to buy war bonds. She did it so successfully that at the end of the day, people had rung in and bought war bonds to the tunes of 40 million, which was a staggering figure for that time. The question that perplexed murphy, the sociologist from the Sociology Department of columbia university, one of whom found the bureau for radio research, what on earth was it about her that produced this magical effect . Im going to start with what listeners said about their experience of listening to kate smith and her broadcast. Here is what they said. This is a selection of quotations from the book. She was speaking straight to me. You would think she was a personal friend. I feel she is talking to me. It seems that she is sitting in your kitchen and talking to you, the way it would be with a friend. She is spontaneous. Her speech is not forced. It is natural. It makes me feel i am talking to my neighbor over the wash line. This in spite of the fact that what kate smith was saying was, in fact, scripted, and listeners new that they were listening to scripted talk. Martin notes and accounts for this effect as cumulative. Through this day, there was reciprocal interplay from the audience, who not only responded to smith, but she was responding to the audience and modifying subsequent remarks as a result. So, and this is the key, martin notes, the usual scripted monologue became something of a conversation in spite of the fact it was scripted and in spite of the fact that listeners knew this, and yet smith, as if she was speaking in her own voice, not as the mouthpiece of others. Put it,f the listeners when others Say Something, you know is what it is what their agent put down. With kate smith, it is what she thinks. The message heard by most listeners was sincerity. Is in effectend, not of what she said, nor if it was scripted or not, but how she said it. Listeners believe in the sincerity of what smith is saying because she sounds to them as if she believes in what she says, in spite of the fact that she is reading scripted words by others. It, groping for a cause in their belief in her it is her speech. When she asked for anything, she gives it everything she has got. It is hard to explain. She says sincere. It is in her tone. No matter what she says, you sit there and listen. She talks as if she herself is going through all that. What she said, she really felt herself. You knew she wasnt just reading a script. This is the upshot of what the data disclosed that listeners believed in smith because they heard in her voice that she meant the words that she was herself reading. They got on the phone and did what she asked them to do to the tune of 40 million to the american war effort. I he had not read mass persuasion some years ago when i was working on one of the books that michelle kindly mention in her introduction, Radio Television and modern life. In it, i had a chapter about a very famous british wartime singer called vera lynn. Vera lynn produced the same effect for british listeners for listeners. They heard her when she sang at the microphon