Oral History Project
MARMIA (the Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archive) preserves and provides access to movies and sounds that document the arts, history, and culture of the U.S. Mid-Atlantic region. MARMIA holds the WJZ-TV collection, which is one of the only surviving local TV collections in the country. The collection contains about 25,000 videotapes, films, and unique items.
Despite the size of the WJZ-TV collection, there are significant gaps due to production workflows that taped over raw footage, deterioration of materials, obsolete play-back technologies, and inconsistent naming conventions.
As a board member for MARMIA, I designed an oral history project to document broadcasting history in Baltimore. The goal of the project is to fill in some of these gaps in the collection, as well as describe a full and vibrant picture of the station during the decades of the materials that we have.
These oral histories live in the MARMIA archive as recordings and transcriptions, and are accessible online through MARMIA’s Broadcasting Oral History Collection on Aviary. They will provide context to researchers, help MARMIA strengthen ties with the WJZ community, and can be used to build awareness about the existence and importance of the archive.