CMCs Archive Civic Life
An outstanding value of a community media center (CMC) is the technology access it offers communities. But another crucial role often overlooked is how CMCs archive civic life. Whether recording community meetings, producing local news or sports coverage, or documenting events, the combined output from Public, Educational, and Government (PEG) access channels alone is staggering.
According to John Hauser, who developed and launched the Community Media Archive, thousands of community groups and over one million volunteer producers, directors, presenters, and technical staff participate in PEG access production annually. These efforts result in more than 20,000 hours of new local programming weekly. The Internet Archive hosts this extensive, publicly searchable archive that gathers diverse local programs created nationwide thanks to community access media infrastructure.
Image credit: Davis Media Access
While the Community Media Archive has served as a valuable digital aggregator, many CMCs could use more support managing their localized archives. Given the diversity among CMCs, it’s fair to say there is still a need to develop a unified theory of improving and streamlining archival practices locally. Developing a practitioner playbook would be one helpful tool.
In exceptional cases, archiving has been embraced as a priority in its own right. Burlington, Vermont’s CCTV Center for Media & Democracy is an example of a CMC with staffing and space resources designated to accommodate an impressive local civic life video archive that extends back to the 1980s. In 2023, the Alliance for Community Media launched its Historic Preservation Task Force to devote attention to this issue nationwide.
I lead Davis Media Access (DMA), a small nonprofit community media center located in Davis, CA. Operating the local public access channels since 1988, educational access since 1997, and LPFM radio since 2004, our center maintains multiple archives, each full of content produced by community members and media center staff. Our public access television library alone contains over 15,000 programs in various formats, about a third of which are digitized.
I’ve long maintained that our archives are an incredible asset for our community, as they tell the story of our city’s priorities and progress over nearly four decades. Their importance is highlighted by the kinds of requests we receive, including:
Show clips or voiceovers from noted community members who have passed—this is our most common request;
Series produced by a loved one who now has dementia;
Reporters looking for archival election footage to see what a candidate said 10 years ago, to see what a parcel of land looked like in the 90s, to help document the history of a particular building, or to follow the trajectory of climate protests in our community;
Frequent requests for archived school board meetings;
In a recent debate over proposed changes to Interstate 80 where it runs through Davis, newspapers in San Francisco and Sacramento referenced one radio show, providing a link to the show. Analytics for that episode jumped 3,000 percent in one week.
“According to John Hauser, who developed and launched the Community Media Archive, thousands of community groups and over one million volunteer producers, directors, presenters, and technical staff participate in PEG access production annually. These efforts result in more than 20,000 hours of new local programming weekly. The Internet Archive hosts this extensive, publicly searchable archive that gathers diverse local programs created nationwide thanks to community access media infrastructure. ”
In the current days of digital everything, all programs we intake are automatically added to the digital archives. But our library is full of programming on Betamax, U-Matic, SVHS, and other obsolete video formats. Transitioning analog materials to digital is a slow process, performed by an actual person, one program at a time, culling through libraries that may have been moved multiple times and logged in various ways over the decades. At DMA, it happens when we can secure an archival intern who has time and reason to devote to the process. Because it’s time and labor-intensive, it’s also expensive and, therefore, easy to justify as a lower priority than day-to-day operations.
DMA is just one among 1,600 CMCs across the country. Together, our archives represent a vast and meaningful contribution to the documentation of American life over the past four decades. Our field needs more funding to support and enhance local efforts to care for and make accessible this material as an important source of community information, one that, properly curated, could greatly enhance local historical and library archives.