The Internet Archive from a Media Studies Background

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Before coming to UW-Madison for my MLIS degree, I had limited exposure to actual archives. I was coming from the Media Studies field, and my previous institution, the University of Texas at Austin, had little in the way of my research interest, television history. Of course, UT-Austin has some incredible repositories; they just didn’t have what I needed. Lucky for me, there are an increasing number of television collections being digitized and made accessible online. The Prelinger Archives, hosted by the Internet Archive, has already been discussed here.But Internet Archive has other resources as well. They host Duke University’s AdViews collection, which has an incredible amount of television commercials from the 1950s through the 1980s. Here are a couple of my favorites that I came across in my research:

Internet Archive also has great collection of episodes from some classic television shows in the public domain. This episode from The Jack Benny Program proved useful in my thesis research:

These resources ended up being very helpful to me, and in some part, they influenced my decision to pursue a life in archives. It may not be as glamorous as working with the original physical materials, but their accessibility and openness was incredibly important to me and will continue to be so for future scholars.

-Carolina Hernandez