Journalism Low Residency Graduate Program Archival Research Resources: Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection

The Walter J. Brown Media Archive & Peabody Awards Collection was started in 1995 and currently preserves over 250,000 titles in film, video, audiotape, transcription disks, and other recording formats dating from the 1920s to the present. Our mission is to preserve, protect, and provide access to the moving image and sound materials that reflect the collective memory of broadcasting and the history of the state of Georgia and its people.

The Peabody Awards Collection contains nearly every entry for the first major broadcast award given in the United States. Entries begin in 1940 for radio and 1948 for television, and we receive at least 1,000 new entries every year --programs by local, national, cable, and international producers. The collection provides a cultural cross-section of television from its infancy to the present day, featuring news, documentary, entertainment, educational, and children's programming. Georgia history is highlighted in three newsfilm collections. The WSB Newsfilm Collection focuses on Atlanta but covers the entire Southeast; the WALB Newsfilm Collection contains raw news footage from Albany and surrounding areas from 1961 to 1978; and the WRDW Newsfilm Collection features footage of the Augusta area from 1961-1976.

Our non-broadcast collection of amateur film, video, and audiotape highlighting Georgia people, places, and musicians includes the Andrew Avery Home Movie Collection; the Kaliska-Greenblatt Home Movie Collection; the Georgia Folklore Collection of field recordings of Georgia folk musicians made by  the Georgia Folklore Society; and the Foxfire Collection, among others.

BROADCAST RADIO AND TELEVISION

The Peabody Awards Collection

The Peabody Awards Collection includes outstanding radio and television programs in all genres: children's programs, documentaries, news, educational programs, entertainment, and public service. There are over 60,000 programs described in the Peabody database. Over 3,000 programs are digitized and can be viewed streaming on the UGA campus. Older programs have analog user copies available in the UGA Libraries Media Department, located in the basement of the Main Library.

The WSB, WALB, and WRDW Newsfilm Collections

Newsfilm was used in broadcast for television newscasts from 1948 until the 1970s. Television from this time period is very different from the television news we know and count on today. During the early history of newsfilm local stations relied heavily on their cameramen to capture local news stories - there were no feeds between stations because the technology to do so was not yet in place. Cameramen would go out and capture the stories on 100 foot reels, return to the studio and process this reversal film stock (film stock that passed through the camera and was broadcast ready after a one-step development process), the film would then be viewed and edited, and put on a film chain (device that included one or more film projectors aligned to TV pick-up camera ) ready for the news broadcast. These three newsfilm collections cover the state of Georgia and the Southeast from 1949-1981.