About a year and a half ago, a few of us from the TTBOOK team traveled down to the basement of our UW-Madison office building, Vilas Communication Hall, known for its brutalist architecture and view of Lake Mendota, in search of the reels for the first 11 years of the show. We unearthed many boxes of physical reel-to-reel tapes and located still more in the UW archives across campus. It felt like we were radio archaeologists, spelunking to save the lost interviews and stories of To the Best of Our Knowledge.
Our search was part of the journey to make sure the legacy of TTBOOK continues, and that you – our listeners and friends – will be able to hear every show, every interview we’ve done. We have now launched the “To the Best of Our Knowledge Special Collection,” with more than 1,150 TTBOOK shows, on the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a collaboration between the Library of Congress and Boston’s GBH to permanently preserve the significant and historic public radio and television of our time. All 35 years of TTBOOK will be available through the site, for free, for anyone to listen to, forever.
We are still adding to the collection as the aforementioned tapes continue to be carefully digitized (we hear they are “sticky,” which makes me even happier we rescued them when we did). After seeing these boxes and boxes of reels, and loading them on a massive truck, it was also amazing to see the last 14 years collected on two small hard drives that were sent to the archives. The collection includes interviews with writers, philosophers, scientists, musicians and politicians, including Jane Goodall, Salman Rushdie, Alice Walker, Oliver Sacks, Jimmy Carter, David Foster Wallace, Toni Morrison, Stephen Sondheim, Margaret Atwood, E.O. Wilson and Yo-Yo Ma. While the voices change, the spirit that Jim Fleming, Steve Paulson and Anne Strainchamps began 35 years ago – that sense of deep connection of hearts and minds – remains. The TTBOOK DNA has a sense of wonder, surprise, joyfulness, and curiosity, no matter the subject - from bees and poetry to socialism and alchemy.
When we started this project, it seemed like a great idea to preserve the shows, and to join other renowned public media in the AAPB special collections like Bill Moyers and Sesame Street. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting provided the initial funding for the AAPB, and the Mellon Foundation has continued the financial support. Of course, when we began the work to archive the show, we didn’t know we would now be working on our final episode, to air Sept. 27, and that the CPB would be defunded and winding down. We are incredibly grateful for our partners at the AAPB for prioritizing the TTBOOK Collection launch. It has been a delight to get to know these archivists who have a passion for history, preservation, and our shared mission of public media that uplifts and helps give meaning to our lives.
Working on this archive has helped me personally move beyond the sadness about the show’s ending, knowing that our work at TTBOOK is not only ours, but yours, and everyone’s - into the future.
– Shannon