Joyce Lieberman in the 1/ 4 inch Fresh Air vault.
Joyce presented a detailed history of WHYY's "Fresh Air with Terry Gross" which began as a three hour, local, interview program in 1975. Snippets of interviews Terry did with standout cultural figures including Bobby Seal (Black Panther Party), George and Giles Martin (Beatles), and Maurice Sendak (Author) were interspersed throughout this first half of the Zoom call. From there we took a deep dive into the efforts involved with preserving the vast ¼ inch tape library covering the first 40+, pre-DAW production years of the program. Preservation technology and meta-data capture to make the digital archive searchable and available to the public were discussed.
The archives are now accessible to the public at https://freshairarchive.org/ and https://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/
