Preserving Iowa Broadcasting History

NEH funding is helping Wartburg College preserve and digitize the Archives of Iowa Broadcasting. Image courtesy of Wartburg College.

Founded in 1994, the Archives of Iowa Broadcasting at Wartburg College collects and preserves the state’s radio and television history, from the 1920s to the present. Its collections include more than 28,000 items that document Iowa history through its news. In addition to collections like Iowa television station KWWL’s recorded broadcasts, the collection holds oral histories taken from more than 100 Iowa broadcasters, among them Iowa’s first female television news anchor, Carole Custer, and civil rights leader Jimmie Porter, who founded one of the nation’s first African-American owned radio stations, KBBG. NEH funding has helped Wartburg College preserve, catalog, and digitize this history, ensuring that it is accessible now and preserved for the future.

Three NEH grants have helped Wartburg College care for this collection. A preservation assistance grant helped the archives bring in an expert consultant who assessed and prepared a report on the audiovisual collection’s condition. A second grant helped the library rehouse film materials that had been identified as in need of help, purchasing archival boxes and environmental monitoring equipment to stabilize these delicate technologies.

NEH funding helped Wartburg College rehouse portions of its film collection. Image courtesy of Wartburg College.

Now an NEH grant is helping the archive improve public access to the collection while continuing to preserve it. In addition to cataloging more than 28,000 items and making them searchable, the library is digitizing more than 2,000 broadcast tapes from KWWL-TV, eastern Iowa’s flagship public station. In addition to being of interest to scholars of broadcast media, these tapes, which will be hosted online, are of great interest to the many Iowans whose family members and friends were featured by the station.