CAPTCHA Project on Online Archiving Highlights the Important and Changing Role of Community Media

September 9, 2015

“Inspiring.”  “Pioneering.”  That’s how Joost van Beek describes community media in Europe today.  Van Beek is a researcher at SPP’s Center for Media, Data and Society (CMDS).  Together with Kate Coyer, they conducted research on behalf of CMDS for the two-year CAPTCHA (Creative Approaches to Living Cultural Archives) project that concluded in August 2015. The goal of the project, which was supported by the Culture Program of the European Union’s Directorate General for Education and Culture, was to promote collaboration among community media groups in Europe, and to explore the state and prospects of their online archiving practices – what is being done now, and what could be done, and how. CMDS partnered in this project with Radio CORAX (Halle, Germany), Radio FRO (Linz, Austria), and Near Media Co-Op (Dublin, Ireland). 

CMDS has a long history of research and policy involvement related to community media. Kate Coyer, director of CMDS’s Civil Society and Technology Project, for example, helped build community radio stations worldwide with the Prometheus Radio Project. She has also authored many articles on the topic including contributions to Internews’ Community Media Sustainability Guide. Coyer and van Beek earlier collaborated on a book chapter about opportunities for community radio in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Van Beek and Coyer collected some “wonderful stories” during their research. “Some of the people involved in community media were pioneers – building some of the first blogs, for example,” explains van Beek. He says that it was inspiring to hear about how they got started, the obstacles they had overcome, and the important work they are doing to empower civil and social groups. Community media reaches diverse audiences of all ages, some in small geographically isolated communities, and others that transcend borders. “In some cases,” says van Beek, “community media is meeting the needs of underserved and minority groups by providing content in the native language of that community. Other community radio stations have deep local roots thanks to a long history of political activism. In all cases, though, they tell stories and touch on subjects that larger or profit-driven stations can’t or won’t cover.”

Van Beek points to Radio Kultura, an online community radio station which promotes and preserves Basque culture, as an example of how community media can create large online archives of audio content, with many thousands of items, and make them attractive and easy to access. Elsewhere, however, community broadcasters lacking adequate financial resources are storing extensive collections of audio tapes that remain undigitized and impossible to access online. The small Irish station Radio Connemara, for example, has archived 6,000 tapes, which encompass an extensive collection of local music as well as personal collections covering much of the town’s history, in an improvised space without heating or air conditioning. In Slovenia, a student radio station makes recent content available on a sleek and popular website, but also built up an internal archive with 40,000 analogue products stretching back to the Yugoslav and war eras, an archive that it lacks the resources to digitize. To compensate for this, the radio station has crowdsourced memories and materials to recreate, on-air, its first ever broadcast.

“Community media plays a vital role providing a platform for people to tell stories about their lives and to share them with others. It is crucial to capture all this content – the music, the stories, the news, the debates, the poetry, etc. that communities are creating; to preserve it, and to not just air it once, but share it in a way that it can be enjoyed by the growing number of people who seek audio content online,” says Kate Coyer.

Although the world of community media is diverse, they all grapple with some similar challenges. One of the biggest is limited financial resources. Community media also relies primarily on volunteers to manage key responsibilities, often as a matter of principle. Although this poses challenges, van Beek notes that it has advantages as well. “Volunteers are often very enthusiastic, have good ideas, and are strongly committed to what they do,” he says. Restrictive or ambiguous copyright regulations pose a major problem, which any community media looking to share audio content online has to confront. “Many of these stations air music content that is covered by copyright regulations. Figuring out how to manage that content online can be time consuming or prohibitively expensive, and so many stations are refraining from uploading large parts of their programming altogether.”

While community broadcasting is a growing sector in many European countries, it is under threat in Hungary where the media authority’s licensing decisions in recent years have squeezed many community stations out of existence, leaving an uncertain fate for their archives as well. Across Europe, Coyer says, “one of the greatest challenges for the long-term sustainability of community media is to ensure an enabling environment and communication policy that supports and encourages community broadcasting.”

There are community media in every country of Europe with some form of online presence, van Beek says, but since so many community radio stations are very small and local, the nature of this presence varies greatly. In countries like Germany, almost everyone live-streams their programs. An increasing number of stations are also uploading audio content in some form. The goal in most instances is to share programming with a larger or more varied audience, but there is a growing appreciation of the importance of archiving itself as well.

Van Beek says that they were not able to identify one single, perfect example of best practice for online archiving during the course of the two-year project. Instead, they found “many best practice elements that can be plucked from each station’s accomplishments, both in terms of the internal organization and processes of archiving, and the structures and design of the online archives themselves.” These “best practice elements” will be highlighted in the final report that will be published later this year and will be available online on the CMDS’ website. “We really want our report to be a practical resource for those who are working in community media on sharing and archiving content online,” says van Beek, “but we hope the report will also be valuable for those engaged with community media more generally, and those who are interested in how web culture is developing over time.” 

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