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Broadcast
Radio and television broadcasts focus on news and public affairs programming, primarily since the 1950s. The Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcasts reached out to audiences in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. English-language broadcasts include speeches presented to the Commonwealth Club of California and William F. Buckley's Firing Line television program. The broadcasts are recorded on a variety of sound and moving image media that often present preservation challenges. As a result, access to these materials is sometimes limited and requires at least two weeks advance notice. For more information about access and fees for reproductions, see A/V Services.
Commonwealth Club of California
More than two thousand sound recordings of speakers addressing the Commonwealth Club of California are housed at the Hoover Archives. A searchable database contains descriptive records (title, speaker name, date) for all of them, with more extensive cataloging an ongoing process.
Firing Line Television Program
The broadcast archive of William F. Buckley Jr.'s television show Firing Line is housed in the Hoover Institution Archives. Firing Line was broadcast from 1966 to 1999, first as an hour-long program and later as a half-hour show. A database describing all 1,504 Firing Line programs is available for searching.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Founded in the tense, early days of the Cold War, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) played the role of a surrogate free press for the nations behind the iron curtain. For more than five decades, RFE/RL has gathered, analyzed, and disseminated information in a unique way. Description and preservation of the collection continues, but several finding aids to the collection are available.
Musical ambassadors documented in Hoover’s Radio Free Europe records
Click on the image to start the slideshow.
Artists traveling throughout Europe in the 1960s, especially American jazz musicians, often visited with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reporters. Included in this slideshow are some notable examples, including Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, and Benny Goodman, as well as many outside the American jazz scene. (The photographs of these musical ambassadors are part of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcast records at the Hoover Institution Archives.)
Click on the image to start the slideshow.
Of the fifteen hundred Firing Line episodes, more than four hundred are recorded on 2-inch quad videotape, the first and oldest broadcast-quality videotape format. These videotapes come spooled on an open reel about a foot in diameter, and each videotape in its case weighs nearly twenty pounds. Specialized videotape preservation laboratories are used to assess, treat, and transfer the content of these 2-inch videotapes to modern videotape formats, as shown in this slideshow.
Click on the image to start the slideshow.
The Hoover Institution Archives holds, among its many collections, more than a thousand instantaneous lacquer discs. Predating the invention of magnetic audiotape, lacquer dics were cut by the radio broadcast industry to record programs and transmissions. These discs consist of a base material (usually aluminum or glass), a coating of nitrocellulose (lacquer), and a binder (adhesive) that holds them together. Over time, the nitrocellulose becomes brittle and the binder breaks down, making lacquer discs universally fragile. Worse, discs from the World War II era are even more delicate because aluminum was replaced by glass during the war effort. Among Hoover’s lacquer disc holdings are the planning sessions for the United Nations, recordings of the United States Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, and the earliest recorded programs of the Commonwealth Club of California.
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