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The Library of American Broadcasting -- long recognized as the nation's preminent collection of broadcast historical material -- was established in the basement of the National Association of Broadcasters headquartersin Washington 35 years ago by a dedicated band of radio and TV pioneers determined to assure that the record of the industry's accomplishments and service would not be lost to history.
When the collections outgrew those premises the Library began a second life in association with the University of Maryland at College Park. There it occupies 25,000 square feet of prime university real estate positioned as the primary resource tracking where the industry has been, what it has accomplished and what comes next in its service to America.
The LABF has a great head start in its mission, which is to discover and acquire the treasures of the past, preserve them for posterity and make them available to a wide audience of academia, industry and the public. The LAB embarks on its fourth decade enriched by more than 1,000 oral histories of broadcast pioneers – the most comprehensive collection of its kind – along with more than 250,000 photographs, dating back long before KDKA went on the air, and more than 10,000 books, 1,000 kinescopes and videotapes as well as 4,300 radio and television scripts. It’s already a resource for the ages but to us it’s only the beginning, with still a long way to go to preserve the character, the traditions, the visions and the very purpose of an industry and a medium whose product, by its nature, disappears into thin air.
Although those three activities -- acquisition, preservation and access – guide everything we do, the LAB’s mission is even broader. It is the institutional memory of a medium so powerful and pervasive that it has come to rank just behind the Executive Branch, the Congress and the Courts in influence and importance to the American people – and has yet to celebrate its first 100 years.
Mission statement
The Library of American Broadcasting Foundation (LABF) strives to gather, preserve and make accessible the historical record of the broadcasting industry – its letters, papers, periodicals and books; its recordings, videos and photographs, as well as its oral histories, speeches, interviews and the wide ranging scope of special collections.
There should be no need to comment here on the significance of this collection to those seeking an understanding of the artistic, political and social implications of the broadcast industry on our culture and age – that case has been effectively made time and again by historians of all eras. The importance of collecting and preserving these documents and materials is similarly self-evident, as inevitably what was once abundant in even recent memory is relegated to oblivion.
In order to maximize the library’s potential, the LABF has embarked on a campaign to raise visibility. We began to address this with a three-fold luncheon, book publishing and broadcast industry reunion in New York in September, 2003, celebrating the new Library’s official grand opening. Our theme was to honor “The First Fifty Giants of Broadcasting” – essentially, the movers and shakers of the medium’s first generation. In addition, we published “Out of Thin Air: The Story of the First 50 Giants of Broadcasting.”
It was a breakthrough event. “Giants” established not only a new marker on the industry calendar but the beginning of a new awareness of the treasure located at College Park. Even the federal government has since taken note of its resources, awarding the Library a grant to identify the many and largely unrecognized contributions of women to the broadcasting medium.
In September of 2004, we increased our Roll of Honor by 17 first generation and contemporary Giants and published “The Giants of Broadcasting, Volume II.”
But these events only begin to address the financial challenge our mission presents. We have also embarked on a $5,000,000 fundraising campaign with an eye toward providing the Library with the resources to match the demands of the 21st century. Principal among them:
Acquisition -- collection building and expansion of the oral history effort.
Preservation -- the creation of an endowment to keep the Library alive and in step with the broadcasting industry itself.
Access-- updating Library operations to incorporate new technologies and outreach to wider constituencies.
The publics we serve
Who is the Library’s primary constituent? First in line at a research library are the faculty and students – the next generation of broadcasting, as it were. Each of these collections has a strong tie-in to the curriculum – at the LAB it’s with journalism, with history, with American studies and with women’s studies. At the next highest level you have graduate students researching their dissertations, along with a faculty enabled to teach, write and publish – the basic scholarship of any discipline.
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