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This paper examines the obstacles to studying and using displaced radio archives, taking as a case study a collection of historic recordings from Nazi Germany that is held at the Czech Radio archive in Prague. This so-called 'Loot Collection' (Kořistní fond) occupies an awkward position between established categories and is confronted simultaneously by the challenges common to historic sound archives, and those specific to collections which have been displaced from their point of origin. The paper shares some early analysis of the history and content of this collection, and argues for a transnational approach to 'activate' other overlooked archival collections whose history and relevance spreads across contemporary national borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Christian Watson (known as Chris Watson) was the first Federal Parliamentary Labor Party (FPLP) leader and from May 1901 to October 1907. During this time, while sitting on the cross benches between Alfred Deakin's Protectionists and George Reid's Free Traders, Labor regularly held the balance of power. For a short stint between April and August 1904, Watson was (the first world Labor and Australia's youngest) prime minister and treasurer. Watson resigned as FPLP leader on 23 October 1907. By choosing not to contest his seat, Watson left parliament on 29 April 1910. It is Watson's resignation as FPLP leader that is the focus of this paper. By drawing on a repository of newspaper clippings once owned by Watson and now held by the National Library of Australia along with Trove Digitised Newspapers, this article analyses the reporting of the week surrounding Watson's resignation including the question if Watson's retained articles favoured a particular stance. The paper concludes that newspapers were of the opinion that the stress of the job and subsequent ill health it induced, led to Watson's resignation. Hence, this paper's focus is contained to Watson's resignation, a period of newspaper reporting and collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before television was established in Germany, cinema newsreels were the only medium that provided audio-visual news. Due to the weekly format, it was impossible to be up-to-date, but reports had to be interesting and attractive. Thus, their aim was partially entertainment. Although exclusive stories and curiosities were important, some aspects were omitted from the screen, including murder, cruelties, major accidents, or diseases. Using specific examples, this paper will outline the design and structure of reports in East and West German newsreels and the ways in which they differed in presenting the two German states. Consistent with the principles of 'New Film History', this paper will use a variety of archive materials to explain the deeper meaning of newsreel films and why they are in the sense of the 'Visual History' approach important for the social and cultural memory of nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that ephemera is a key instrument of cultural memory, marking the things intended to be forgotten. This important role means that when ephemera survives, whether accidentally or deliberately, it does so despite itself. These survivals, because they evoke all those other objects that have necessarily been forgotten, can be described as uncanny. The paper is divided into three main sections. The first situates ephemera within an uncanny economy of memory and forgetting. The second focuses on ephemera at a particular historical moment, the industrialisation of print in the nineteenth century. This section considers the liminal place of newspapers and periodicals in this period, positioned as both provisional media for information as well as objects of record. The third section introduces a new configuration of technologies—scanners, computers, hard disks, monitors, the various connections between them—and considers the conditions under which born-digital ephemera can linger and return. Through this analysis, the paper concludes by considering digital technologies as an apparatus of memory, setting out what is required if we are not to be doubly haunted by the printed ephemera within the digital archive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Irish bishops found themselves part of a conservative minority when the Second Vatican Council embarked on a radical overhaul of the Catholic Church between 1962 and 1965. The Irish Church hierarchy generally implemented the resultant changes in a hesitant and unenthusiastic manner. Criticism of their performance was generally muted but the spirit of Vatican II was not entirely without enthusiastic Irish advocates. REALITY, a Redemptorist monthly with a large and mainly young readership, experienced ongoing conflict with clerical censors in the second half of the 1960s. Material in the Archive of the Dublin Catholic Archdiocese show clashes occuring over ecumenism, Vatican II's new conception of the duties of the Catholic lay person and the issue of whether church teaching ought to be enforced by state law. A complicating factor inhibiting repressive action by the Archdiocese was the links forged by this religious magazine with the secular world of Dublin journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of Swedish mail-order catalogues in the everyday life of the early twentieth century, and in the development of consumer culture. The study deals with the materiality, content and distribution of the mail-order catalogues as well as their use in everyday life. The case of Åhlén & Holm, a major Swedish mail-order company, and its audience is relevant beyond the national context, since it demonstrates how extensive distribution of and interaction with commercial media can induce a crucial societal change such as the development of consumer culture. Arguing for a 'media history from below', the source material consists of responses to a qualitative questionnaire, besides catalogues and other material from the company archive. The result shows that the mediated encounter with Åhlén & Holm provided its audience with a commercial literacy that entailed both an emancipation from the economic, geographical and social constraints of everyday life and a confinement in a commercial world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For centuries, understanding archives has been key to historians' work. Within the last decades, the increasing availability of sources in digital archives has fostered a growing need to understand how the logics of these influence historical research. Because, even if the digital representations of the individual sources might appear similar to those in analogue archives, using digital archives impacts the work of historians in new ways. In this article, I offer an outline for a digital archival literacy which supports a professional reflection on the everyday uses of digital archives. I propose seeing the shift from analogue to digital archives as a shift in medium, which establishes a new set of logics for the archival production, content, distribution and use. The framework draws upon notions of media literacy developed within the British Cultural Studies tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That technologies often govern the realm of possible research is a reality of the historian's enterprise. Although much attention has been paid to considering both the promises and pitfalls of newspaper digitization—specifically the increased speed with which searches can be conducted and archives culled for information alongside the drawbacks of proprietary databases and software—these are not the only transformations to the research-scape. Using her research examining news coverage of the controversial 1985 bombing of the MOVE1 house in Philadelphia, PA as a case study, the author explores the challenges of using digital newspaper archives that configure articles as plain text rather than as image files. The author considers how the absence of visuals, specifically photographs, from such databases complicates the work of media historians. Such databases, the author argues, stifle the otherwise productive communicative tension between 'seeing and saying.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay sets out some of the conceptual and methodological reasons why the historiography of the mass media has tended to consist of parallel histories of individual mediums rather than an integrated history of the mass media as such. It looks in detail at one specific case study, the British mass media in the inter-war years, to explore what a more integrated historical approach might tell us both about the development of each medium in turn and the culture of intermediality in which they have always in reality operated (including convergence of media styles, growing interdependence of content, notably through the newspaper radio and film column, and crossovers of personnel), and been experienced. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Uneven access to television archives across Europe has posed a number of problems for transnational and historical comparison. Developments in online technologies have promised new opportunities for creating access to television content at national and international levels, yet the potential for transnational comparison remains problematic. This report focuses on Video Active, a major European collaboration between broadcasters, archives, technologists and television scholars to create online access to television programming and to promote comparative approaches to television history. The report will illustrate, however, a number of factors that continue to inhibit online access to television content, and it will show how classificatory schemes and metadata can influence the pre-selection, interpretation and comparison of accessible programming. The report will go on to explore how the project has developed practical solutions to some of these issues and will suggest that continued collaboration on a larger scale may yet hold the long-term answers to problems of access and interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]