From 1973 to 2011, the Evergreen Radio Reading Service served blind and print-disabled listeners across the state of Washington. Now, with its recordings stored in a fragile audio archive and at risk of permanent loss, a team of MLIS students has taken on the challenge of preserving its legacy.
The Evergreen Radio Reading Service (ERRS) operated out of the (WTBBL). For 24 hours a day, ERRS read newspapers, stories, grocery ads and many other resources to the blind and print-disabled community. Since the program ended, its content has been stored in WTBBL’s audio archive, where material degradation and obsolescence now threatens the preservation of its history.
The Master of Library and Information Science Capstone team is working to launch a digitization and preservation program for the ERRS archive collective. Ilias Bowen-Sicalides, Joshua Craig, Alex Heller and Alina Weseloh took on this project as a continuation from a 2024 Capstone project.
Michael Ackerman, Connie Cheng and Isabel Wagner, all MLIS ’24 alumni, completed phase one of the project last year, when they created an inventory of 2,497 items from the physical collection of the ERRS archive.
Phase two involves further preparation to digitize items from the archive, with the goal of creating a publicly accessible database. This includes additional inventory of WTBBL’s digital materials, conducting oral history interviews with former ERRS staff, and addressing legal challenges related to preserving copyrighted content in a public archive.
After last year’s completed inventory of the physical items, this year’s team is working on an inventory of digital materials from the archive. Bowen-Sicalides (pictured above, at right) and Weseloh (pictured at center) are reviewing a wide range of items from the ERRS archive that were either digitized or originally created in digital format. Together they are creating a list of the 12,000 digital files WTBBL saved in their archive into an inventory spreadsheet.
“We've started doing the digital inventory, which is a slightly more involved process than the physical inventory because the physical tapes are mostly reel-to-reel tapes that can't be listened to at this stage until they are digitized,” Weseloh said.
The group’s sponsor and WTTBL managing librarian, Traci Timmons, admires the team’s organizational skills. “I appreciate them pushing through the continuation of inventorying. It's such tedious behind-the-scenes work that encapsulates nearly 30 metadata fields and requires so much focus,” she said.
The ERRS provided an invaluable resource for the blind and print disabled residents of Seattle, Spokane and the Tri-Cities. The contributions of the engineers, broadcasters and directors behind WTBBL’s Evergreen Reading Radio Service are a key part of its legacy. Craig is leading the collection of oral history, combing through audio files to identify those who worked on ERRS and conducting interviews with them.
“This starts in a pre-internet era,” he said. “It was much more valuable back then because there's screen readers now and the same information is accessible to people in different ways.”
While WTBBL currently runs a podcast in a similar vein, Craig finds that it doesn't fully replicate the role that ERRS once played. To help preserve its history, his oral history interview files will accompany the content in the archive.
One of the group’s main goals is to make this content accessible to everyone. To support that effort, Heller is researching the legal implications of creating a publicly available archive that includes readings of copyrighted material.
“Part of this involved me reading through the whole copyright law for the United States and others, just to compare and contrast for competitive and comparative analysis,” Heller said.
Based on their findings so far, they believe it is unlikely that the entire ERRS archive of radio broadcasts can be made available to the general public due to copyright law. A more feasible option may be to upload the archive to the Braille and Audio Reading Download service application, which is only accessible to blind or print-disabled patrons.
Heller (pictured above, at left) is working to distinguish the copyrighted content from the original content of the digital inventory, in the hope that the original content can be shared with the public eventually.
“Every day, every year it becomes more vital to preserve this content, because it's only at a higher probability of getting lost."
In one of the archived audio shows, Heller said, “Volunteers would write and perform radio plays and audio dramas for the Braille library. I've listened to a few of them and they're great. That's something that is my priority for getting digitized and hopefully shared with the public, because even though it was produced for a specific audience, it is not copyrighted content and is all original.”
Preservation of this content is an important part of WTBBL’s history, as well as the history of independent radio and that of the print-disabled community in the Pacific Northwest.
“Every day, every year it becomes more vital to preserve this content, because it's only at a higher probability of getting lost,” Heller said.
Recent losses to government funding for library services highlight the vital role these resources play, not only for the print-disabled community, but for all communities that depend on libraries.
“WTBBL has been hit pretty hard by the cuts to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which funded several full-time staff,” Bowen-Sicalides said. “We've lost basically every federally funded grant opportunity to digitize this collection.”
They are also researching potential funding methods for this project’s future of digitization.
Despite the funding losses, the group understands that their project is only a small part of a much larger issue. They recognize that many other communities and preservation efforts are facing similar, if not greater, challenges.
“It's not so much that our project, specifically, reflects this political environment. This is something that has happened to a huge community of people trying to save these objects, and we are just one of them,” Weseloh said.
Looking ahead, the team hopes to secure funding to begin the digitization process before another group potentially takes on the next phase of the project.
Bowen-Sicalides said, “It's a very big project, and we've only been working on a small part of it, but I'm really happy with what we've accomplished.
“There's so much history in these recordings that would be easy to lose forever, but hopefully we've helped to preserve them and they'll be available for WTBBL patrons, if not everyone, sometime soon.”