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NewsvineLast Monday, Stanford acquired the entire radio archive of New Dimensions Media — a collection comprising thousands of hours of historic interviews with public figures such as Maya Angelou, Bill Moyers and the Dalai Lama. Stanford is currently discussing the possibility of making the archive publicly available online.
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“This archive will complement and enrich our long-standing collections,” said Roberto Trujillo, head of the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at the Stanford University Libraries, adding that there will be “a wealth of new content for students to examine and study.”
New Dimensions is an independent, listener-supported organization that spotlights innovative and diverse viewpoints on a wide array of cultural topics through its flagship radio show.
The program, which runs weekly on public radio, reaches over 300 community venues in the U.S., including San Francisco’s KALW, 91.7 FM. It reaches another 200-300 stations globally and is also available through Internet and satellite radio.
New Dimensions co-founder Michael Toms said the program is meant to address “cultural shifts and changing landscapes in our society” and to provide a forum for people to tell their stories in a powerful way.
“With the general media, you get the idea that the world’s going to hell in a hand basket and there’s no way out,” Toms said. “We aim to convey knowledge, but also hope; the hope in human possibility.”
“Hope,” he added, “is believing in spite of the evidence and working actively to change the evidence.”
The radio broadcasts will be a welcome addition to the University’s collections. Some of New Dimension’s featured guests, such as environmental activist and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller and “futurist” and editor Stewart Brand, already have papers and published works archived at Stanford.
Trujillo dismissed Associated Press reports that Stanford will not disclose how much it spent acquiring the collection. In fact, he said, there is nothing to disclose. According to Trujillo, the collection is a deeded gift to the University, and, while the University will house the archive, New Dimensions will retain all copyrights and commercial rights.
There are some costs associated with the acquisition, which Trujillo said were minimal. Stanford will pay New Dimensions a nominal fee to prepare master copies of its recordings, and the University will also pay for the housing and upkeep of the physical archive in its auxiliary library, SAL-3, in Livermore, Calif.
The real expense will come in the form of the digitization project envisioned for the archive. The hope is to convert New Dimensions’ over 3,500 interviews from analog to digital format and to make the entire collection publicly available online. For that, the University will seek outside funding.
“When we finish this project, the whole archive will become part of the public record,” Trujillo said.
The digitized collection, to be hosted on Stanford servers, will be accessible through Socrates, Stanford’s online catalog, and through public search engines such as Google.
Both Toms and Trujillo are confident they can secure funding for the digitization of the archives.
“With the kind of influence Stanford wields, it shouldn’t be a problem,” Toms said.
The two are currently talking with several organizations, including Google, to finance the project, and they plan to apply for grant money. The project does not yet have a concrete timeline, but Trujillo expects it will take several years.
“We’re talking about converting thousands of hours of interviews, so that’s going to take a chunk of time,” he said. “We’re going to whittle away at it, but there’s no definite estimate for when it’s going to be publicly available.”
Contact Melody Dye at pkipsy@gmail.com.