In his article published in info7 – Das Magazin für Medien, Archive und Information, Dr. Hans-Ulrich Wagner writes about the situation of public broadcasting archives and their importance for users as well as for authors working for broadcasters.
Abstract
There was talk of a “memory of broadcasting” in 2014, when the archives of public broadcasters launched an initiative to highlight “their importance for research” (Behmer/Bernard/ Hasselbring 2014). Since then, much has happened to underline this immense importance, and quite a lot has happened to bring the seemingly separate worlds – archives here and research there – much closer together. In view of the role that mass media communication plays in all questions of our coexistence, one can go further and speak of a “media memory of society”. It grows with the written material and especially with the audio-visual holdings in the archives of the broadcasting companies and stations; it wants to be professionally compiled and used. As the head of the research programme “Knowledge for the Media Society” at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research, Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg and as a media historian primarily in the research field “Writers and Broadcasting”, I was asked to look at the situation of broadcasting archives from a user’s perspective.
Wagner, Hans-Ulrich (2022): Arbeit am Medien-Gedächtnis der Gesellschaft [Working on the Media Memory of Society]. In: info7 – Das Magazin für Medien, Archive und Information. 1/2022. pp. 4-9. (PDF)