Media

For years, radio and television stations have discarded archival material, and there is little radio tape, TV film or early videotape footage surviving. Where it does exist, there is often no usable indexing system.

The urgency of the NBA effort was shown this week when a crew from Reno’s KTVN went to the Special Collections section of the UNR library to shoot footage of newspaper headlines and still photos of Ronald Reagan’s 1980s visits to UNR.

KTVN once had a file tape of its live broadcast of Reagan’s ’82 speech on the university quad, but the news department that year loaned it to the promotions department for the production of spots promoting its news coverage, and it was never returned. This week, when it was needed, it was not at hand.