Project Summary
Unalaska Community Broadcasting (UCB) is raising
funds to save the video history of our community. There are about 1900
tapes in our attic that are rapidly degrading. Tapes need to be digitized for
our permanent archive, and for local viewing and use.
UCB serves the community of Unalaska and Port
of Dutch Harbor in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.
We operate a television station over Channel 8. Since our beginning in the early 1980s,
Channel 8 has always existed for Unalaska.
Volunteers and staff cover every
major news and cultural event that takes place in our community.
UCB was recently included in the American
Archive Content Inventory Program through the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting, and this allowed us to create a database of all of the tapes in
our collection. The AACIP program then
funded the professional digitization of 65 tapes. UCB footed the bill to digitize an additional
73 at-risk and high priority tapes at the same time. In our
attic, there are still about 1900 tapes left to digitize at the cost of about
$40 per tape.
This project will professionally digitize 10%
of our remaining tapes - a small
but substantial step towards our eventual goal of digitizing the entire
collection.
What We Need & What You Get
UCB is hoping to raise $8,000 using
Indigogo. Funds will cover professional
digitization of 200 tapes. That’s about
10% of the video cassettes in our library.
Digitization costs about $40 per tape, and that’s not including shipping
and the purchase of hard drive space needed for storage of digital
content. The bottom line is that
digitization is expensive, but the
results are astounding! When we received digitized video content through the AACIP project, we were amazed by the quality of the
video clips. For the first time in more than a decade, we were able to view beautiful footage of Unalaska before paved roads,the old softball field, the fishing fleet heading out for the King Crab opening, and Reeve Aleutian Airways planes taking off and landing. Most importantly, we were able to identify the faces of friends and family and Channel 8 volunteers and staff. Viewing the archival video made us realize the value of the tapes that are currently languishing in our attic.
The video clip above is just a tiny sample of the content that was discovered during the last round of digitization. We need your help to
save more Channel 8 tapes.
Our collection is full of treasured footage
including:
-
Oral histories with local
elders and important Unangan
cultural demonstrations including dance, language and subsistence activities,
as well as Russian Orthodox traditions and practices.
-
30 years of footage of Unalaska kids growing
up: countless school music performances, holiday events, foot races, and Fourth
of July parades.
-
Arts and cultural projects such as original
television dramas, plays and performances, cooking shows, and experimental
video created by station volunteers.
-
Documentation of WWII history, including footage of commemorative events,
and interviews with veterans who served in our region during the War.
-
Interviews of celebrities and politicians who
visited Unalaska such as Senator Ted Stevens, author Alex Haley, musician
Jimmy Buffet, actor Richard Gere, Discovery Channel’s Mike Rowe, and AFL’s Larry
Csonka.
-
Footage of YOU. Community members and volunteers are the real stars of Channel 8. We document nearly every cultural event that
takes place in our small town and if you have lived in Unalaska you were probably
on Channel 8 at some point.
What do you get back? First of all, the joy of knowing that you
just unearthed a unique piece of video that hasn’t been seen in many
years. But we also have some perks
built in to our giving structure to sweeten the deal. If you give $10, you can have a bumper
sticker that we designed based on a patch that the station used to give out in the
1980s. When you give $40 you’ve just funded
the digitization of an entire tape! That’s
exciting! And in return, we’ll give you
a limited edition 30 year anniversary water bottle. For only $80, a coffee cup is yours and the
cup features our old logo of the eight ball knocking over the Channel 8 broadcast tower. For only $20 more, you can have the same cool
design on a t-shirt. Every dollar
donated helps us reach our fundraising goals, but the high dollar donors get to
have the real fun. If you give $500 we
let YOU pick ten of the tapes to digitize.
As a thank you, we’ll also send you DVDs of all ten tapes. People who give $1,000 can ask staff to help
memorialize the person of their choice with a custom DVD. And for only $1,500 we’ll give a business or
individual sponsorship credits before and after our new Flashback Friday television show, the show that’s going to get this
content off the shelves and back on the airwaves!
Other Ways You Can Help
Even if you can't give, you can help by telling
people about our effort to save the
Channel 8 archives. We have 60 days to raise the funds, and we need
friends of Channel 8 from past and present to give us a hand. Share this project on your Facebook page, email the link
to a friend, talk about it, think about friends who used to be frequent
volunteers on Channel 8 and make sure they have all the information that they
need to contribute to this essential community project.