Week Six, Day Nine- October 26

Today we continued to work on the materials from the 1950s. There are just a ton of photos in this collection! Most of the photos were head shots or promotional photos of various radio personalities which I think is interesting, but I'm not sure how it would be helpful to researchers unless they were just looking for a picture of a particular radio personality that they had already researched. Whenever I work on processing a collection, I always like to imagine the ways in which researcher might be able to use the items in the collection. I guess I just haven't thought hard enough to discover the ways in which this collections will be used, but I'm sure that I will come up with something. When I first started to work on a collection at the archive at the university, I hard a very difficult time thinking of ways someone would want to use the materials I was working with, but as time went on, I began to see the value in the items and the entire collection. I'm sure with time I will be able to think of something.

We were able to finish up the pictures today and go a start on the documents. I find this to be much more entertaining and interesting because some of the letters and newspaper articles really tell the story of the development of black radio in Birmingham and other cities in the United States. I especially enjoyed looking at various Federal Communication Commission reports because they give facts and figures to the overall history of black radio.