With support from a $1.7 million estate gift, Nebraska Public Media is preserving decades of local broadcasting history for future use and education.
Tucked away in Nebraska Public Media’s building is 70 years of history – thousands of photos, slides, videotape, videodiscs, film, audio recordings and documents.
Organizing, cataloging and preserving our collective past is the mission of Alexis Scargill, who worked as a television news producer in Boston before going to graduate school to become a media archivist.
In 2022, the network received a $1.7 million estate gift from an anonymous donor who was an avid viewer, especially programs about history, local documentaries and the arts. Conversations with the donor and family members led to an agreement to preserve the gift ’s principal amount and use investment earnings to support projects related to history.
“This gift is exceptionally meaningful. We are just understanding the value of our collection and how it can inspire future content for our viewers and listeners,” said Becca Jewell, director of major and planned giving.
Scargill and her team of student workers are deeply involved in the daunting, sometimes dusty task. “So far, the new archivist has inventoried over 12,000 assets, assigning bar codes and making inventory lists to make tracking and retrieval easier. She also reorganized and cleaned the space to keep assets safe,” said Chief Content Officer Nancy Finken.
Scargill submitted three collections to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, housed in the Library of Congress. It preserves the most significant public television and radio programs of the past 60 years, making them accessible on-line for research and educational purposes.
Additionally, being part of the AAPB provides Nebraska Public Media with access to a cataloging system that will make it easier to search and collate our own collections for use in future productions.
Her next task is cataloguing and creating an inventory of the network’s photos, as well as continuing to work with University of Nebraska- Lincoln archivists on a collection previously stored at the Nebraska State Historical Society and now at a climate-controlled location at UNL.
“An archivist’s work is tedious and can be quite messy, as well as extremely interesting. She brings exceptional skills in library science and broadcast news to the job, along with a keen curiosity. The journey of discovery has been wonderful to observe,” said Finken.
The recent archival work is already visible in the new YouTube series Nebraska High School Classics which revisits championships games and adds newly recorded commentary from players and coaches.
“We have about 20 years of recordings of high school championship games, and so many of them have bigger stories to tell beyond just a win or a loss,” said Finken.