The National Library of Latvia (NLL) hosted an event on February 15th to celebrate the completion of a project with Hoover to describe more than 280 historic Latvian Service Radio Free Europe broadcasts.
The event was open to the public and attended by former RFE broadcasters such as Pāvils Brūvers who may be heard in several of the broadcasts in the collection. Latvia’s main national TV network, Latvijas Sabiedriskie Mediji, covered the event including news segments both that evening and on the following day’s Sunday news program. A written account of this coverage can be seen here.
Hoover archivist, Brandon Burke, and Zane Grosa, Head of NLL’s Audiovisual Reading Room, served as project managers for the collaboration which completes the description of the Latvian Service open reel tapes and audio cassettes in Hoover’s Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty collection. NLL is developing a dedicated portal on its website for users to discover and stream the programs in Latvian. Until then, most of the broadcasts are discoverable via its online digital library. English-language descriptions are being added to Hoover’s Digital Collections site now. More information is available in Hoover’s Latvian Service finding aid.
To learn more about the RFE/RL Historical Recording Description Project contact Brandon Burke (brburke@stanford.edu) or visit https://www.hoover.org/Radio-Liberty-Historical-Recording-Description-Project.
