MPR Archive: Preserving Minnesota's History

Over our five decade history, MPR has documented the events and stories that have impacted Minnesota at a national, regional, and local level. This well of content is available to bring nuance and context to the discussions of the day and to offer pathways to partnership with audiences that we are trying to reach with a message of inclusion and trust.

The Archive enables access and participation in Minnesota history'from rural communities across Minnesota to communities across the world'by making unique analog content accessible in digital formats on the MPR Archive website. Anyone with internet access can find this content for their own personal enjoyment, or to use for journalistic, academic or research endeavors.

Over FY24-25, the MPR Archive will focus on two critical aspects of archive work: 1) preservation of at-risk materials and 2) enrichment of our public-facing portal.

' Preservation of at-risk materials: This will entail cataloging, digitizing, and preserving thousands of hours of fragile media (CD-R, DAT, and tape),ingesting that audio into the MPR Archive digital collections,and then publishing that content onto the Archive's web portal. This work will also include stabilizing and preserving masters and originals of archival collection materials through rehousing and cataloging physical collection materials. The content chosen for this project represents the art, history, and cultural heritage of Minnesota as captured by MPR in audio recordings, video, and images through a wide range of programming.

' Enrichment of our public-facing portal: The Archive preserves MPR's unique analog recordings by digitizing archival audio, as well as born digital audio, making them freely accessible on the MPR Archive website. The preserved digital content is also rebroadcast by our own FM stations or used for on-demand content when events of the day recall historic events. Our listeners, Minnesotans, are able to engage with the historic content relating to current events on a deeper level by following MPR programming stories to the Archives website and listening to the full, original audio in new context.

As the Archive embraces its audience-facing mission and strives to serve more Minnesotans, enhancing the Archive's public-facing web portal is central to its and MPR's work. We aim to do that by pairing that work with a social media and web strategy that is focused on regularly publishing content to our website and by curating and contextualizing that content by ensuring the metadata is accurate and inclusive.

In conjunction with that, we aim to focus on sharing stories and perspectives that highlight voices which are often absent from the media narrative. To achieve all of this, we aim to transcribe collections of historic, digital audio to provide additional access and findability to our colletions,create and update supplemental content (primary resource sets, descriptive abstracts) for our archival catalog records,and provide learning aids to assist people of all ages and abilities. By focusing on diversity of content and formats'a wide range of topics in the digitized audio recordings, representative highlights from the digitized images, a curated presentation of all of MPR's award-winning audio recordings'we intend to provide something of interest to a wide range of people across the state and beyond.

These priorities increase the likelihood that our collection materials will continue to be used and experienced, further extending long-term preservation via one of the most difficult but effective preservation measures: people knowing and caring about the material.