Subscribe, Rate and Preserve Wherever You Get Your Podcasts

Contemporary podcasting is used not only to extend the reach of existing radio stations and personalities but also by hundreds of independent content creators who can bypass the strictures of traditional distribution channels to deliver audio programs directly to online audiences. Preserve This Podcast (PTP) was an Andrew W. Mellon-funded outreach and education project designed to raise awareness among indie podcasters of the need to proactively preserve their content and teach basic techniques for podcast preservation. This paper discusses the preservation challenges faced by indie broadcasters and strategies the PTP team used to address these through face-to-face workshops, online outreach, and web-based tools, using the present threat of “podfade” to raise larger issues surrounding the urgency and challenges of preserving born-digital audio content.