A great thing about attending a large conference like SAA is that you get to meet so many interesting people with such a wide variety of jobs. ?One of my favorite sessions at this year?s conference was paneled by a group of public media archivists, a job title previously unfamiliar to me. ?The session, ?Long Live the Story! How Public Media Archivists Are Influencing Content Lifecycle Best Practices Outside the Traditional Archive,? focused on how archivists working in ?hybridized? archives, such as those of public radio or television stations, can successfully apply archival best practices. While much of the discussion was completely new to me ? content management? metadata integration? – ?I loved hearing about the panelists? different job duties. ?These ranged anywhere from being a Broadcast Librarian to a ?ScrumMaster? (kind of a project manager), to conducting metadata integration or preserving old audio equipment used by a radio station.

Andrew Lanset, Director of the WNYC Archives, presented some gems from the radio station?s archives. These included a sound clip from a Leadbelly and Lomax performance, photos of radio ephemera and a look at WNYC?s Archives and Preservation websites, ?Annotations? and ?History Notes.? ?Jenel Farrell, Digital Archivist for Minnesota Public Radio, was originally hired as the website builder for MPR?s digital archive. Before Farrell could work on this, however, most of MPR?s collections had to actually be digitized first. In addition to building the archive, Farrell added thousands of MPR records to the database. Ryan Weston then described his role as Media Operations Manager for WNET.ORG, the public media provider for New York City and the television stations Thirteen and WLIW21. ?Weston, who comes from more of an IT background rather than the traditional library science or archives track, described the complicated processes involved in managing and converting files for WNET.

While all of the panelists? jobs sounded incredibly interesting and challenging, Farrell and Weston?s presentations especially opened my eyes to some of the skills that might be worth acquiring in preparation for a non-traditional archives job. Along with citing ?flexibility? as one of the desired skills for a public media archivist, Farrell noted that a knowledge of programming languages and web-building skills are very useful to have before coming to a digital archives or public media position. Although some may still consider public media archivists and their archives as non-traditional, it was both interesting and refreshing to think about what a huge role their work has and will have in the digital environment.