Report on Online Community Media Archiving Issued

New research report, issued by the Center for Media, Data and Society at the Central European University School of Public Policy, explores some of the challenges, obstacles, opportunities and prospects for online community media archiving. It highlights best practices and lessons learned that can be used to help improve the ways programming is shared, exchanged, and archived online.

The research is aimed to empower community media and program makers to increase the online accessibility of their programs.

The title of the report, authored by Joost van Beek with contributions from Kate Coyer, is ‘Bold strides or tentative steps? How community broadcasters share and archive content online’.  

The findings of the research show that for the majority of community broadcasters in Europe, online sharing and archiving is still in an embryonic stage. Almost all stations feature a live-stream of on-air content, but for many stations this is the full extent of their on-line audio content. Some upload audio primarily in the form of attachments to articles or news items. Many others are still at a basic podcasting level. However, the researchers identified a number of interesting cases in which individual community broadcasters have gone beyond those practices, and this report focuses on highlighting how they have done so and what lessons can be learnt from their experiences.

For this study, the authors spoke with a cross section of community radio stations across Europe and examined the online practices of many more. The questions they wanted the answers to were:

• How have successful models of sharing and archiving content online been developed?
• How are these online archives structured and organized?
• How is the work flow structured and who plays what role?
• What training, guidance, and moderation are needed and established?
• What technical capacities and other related issues do stations grapple with?
• What are the challenges in these respects, what practical solutions are being found, and what problems are not being adequately solved?

The report is the result of research carried out in the framework of the CAPTCHA project. The project was a partnership of three community media organizations (Radio Corax, Germany; the Near Media Co-op, Ireland; Radio FRO, Austria) and the Center for Media, Data and Society and ran from September 2013 to August 2015. It was supported by the Culture Programme of the European Union.

The report is available here (on the CMDS website).