Prologue—Podcasts are Disappearing Transcript

MOLLY: Fifteen years ago, in 2004, Jason Scott started building a machine in his basement. He named it… the Podsucker. And he built it to suck up as many podcasts as he could.

JASON: I was downloading thousands of episodes. By just using directories, downloading them as MP3s, and putting them into hard drives, with this kind of self-created archival system.

MOLLY: This machine downloaded podcasts from every source that Jason could find. And then it saved them onto hard drives. The entire setup fit on just one shelf.

JASON: It was one single machine, Podsucker. It was red, it had this beautiful window with these glowing bits inside. And then I put that machine in the basement, running 24/7, running this program, and just constantly going.

MOLLY: Jason built the podsucker because he was concerned about the future of podcasts. He had a dayjob managing computer servers. He knows something that a lot of people don’t: which is that the stuff we make on computers has a surprisingly short lifespan.

JASON: Unlike a lot of other media, like paper and film, digital media lives as a file on a spinning piece of metal that has magnetic oxide sprayed on it, that’s inside of a vacuum inside of another box, and everything about that is utterly ridiculous. A disk drive has to be constantly moving to be read, and so whenever it’s plugged in, it’s just moving. And they’ve come up with ways to mitigate the destruction, but over time it WILL DIE.

MOLLY: When it comes to podcasts the same issues apply. Jason noticed that a lot of people were making podcasts. But no one seemed concerned about their impending digital death.

JASON: So I was like, this this is super at risk. The potential for them to disappear is really huge. I’m going to just grab it all.

MOLLY: Everything we make on computers is stored on some machine that’s located somewhere. These machines wear down over time, just like any machine. Even the stuff that’s on the internet – it’s just stored on someone else’s servers. And it turns out that all these machines we use to store data – the servers, and the computers, and the hard drives – they all have about the same lifespan.

JASON: You’re going to be talking about everything dying within 5 years.

Jason’s Podsucker captured around 540 different shows and over 14,000 podcast episodes.

But then, in 2007, Jason shut off the Podsucker.

Jason figured that as podcasting became more of an official medium, some institution or other would come around and start doing the kind of work that he was doing with the Podsucker.

But that… never happened.

I went through a sample Jason’s Podsucker collection of podcasts from 2005. I did some more searching to see if these podcasts are still online today. I looked for 125 episodes, and I could only find 13 of them. If Jason hadn’t captured them with his Podsucker, we wouldn’t even know that 87% of these podcasts had ever existed.

Some media institutions do have an archivist on staff, but that’s pretty rare. The truth is, if you make a podcast, NO ONE is out there saving your podcast for you.

DAVE: It’s only a matter of time before all that is GONE, you know. And it’s terrible because we are using this medium as if it were indelible.

MOLLY: That’s Dave Winer. He’s a software developer who helped invent podcasting back in 2001, when he wrote MP3 files into an RSS format. He says it’s common for people to lose their content when tech companies fold.

DAVE: Well that’s tech companies. And you’re giving that to a silo that’s going to go out of business one day and swallow all your archives with it. I mean it’s hideous what happens. So much good stuff that’s just going to disappear.

That’s why this podcast is here. Through this podcast, we’re going to teach podcasters how to preserve their podcasts. And to help us out, we’re working with two archivists and four indie podcast producers. These are some of the people who are dealing with these issues right now.

KAYTLIN: I know how to get the podcast into this box. I don’t know how to get the podcast on the internet and I certainly don’t know how to preserve things on the internet.

ALICE: It’s like what, how come I didn’t think about archiving this podcast. And I think it’s because I was just assuming that it’s digital and it would always be there

MARY: I kind of think of archives as something that you think is a given. It doesn’t just happen.

This is Preserve This Podcast, a show about how to save our podcasts. I’m Molly Schwartz. My archivist co-conspirators are Dana Gerber Margie and Mary Kidd. This podcast is brought to you by the Metropolitan New York Library Council with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

If you’d like to preserve your podcast for future listeners, visit our website at preservethispodcast.org. And subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts.

Ep1—Time to Take Notice Transcript

MOLLY: When Alice Y. Hom was growing up, it was hard for her to talk to her parents about her love life.

ALICE: As a young person I really didn’t have an inkling or an understanding of my sexuality.

I was saved in some ways because dating in my family wasn’t something that you did, like my parents didn’t want their kids to date, and I think partly because it was a Chinese immigrant family.

I did feel like I had to like boys, but I never really did. And I actually didn’t come out to my dad, officially, like verbally. And I think part of that was a language barrier. I didn’t speak Toishanese, the dialect of my parents, at a high level. So explaining these things was a difficult kind of thing.

MOLLY: When Alice was 18, she moved out of her parents’ house in Los Angeles and went to college on the East Coast. In a whole new environment, she started to explore her sexual identity. And one of the first places she turned to was to books.

ALICE: There were essays by Asian American feminists, there were essays by black lesbians. That to me was like, oh ding ding!, that resonates with me.

And I was actually able to find a book by Kitty Tsui, a published book about a Chinese American lesbian.

And that was eye-opening for me because I could read about a Chinese American woman who had gone through something similar. About her immigrant family or about feeling bicultural, or feeling the sexism in her own family.

It was huge for me to be able to have that, read that, and realize I’m not alone.

MOLLY: Alice’s bookshelf grew to a couple feet long. But only a couple inches of that bookshelf were taken up by books that reflected her own life experience. Books written by Asian American feminists or lesbians. As Alice got ready to graduate, she got more and more curious about the lives of women like her.

ALICE: I knew I couldn’t go back to L.A. because like my parents would be there, and I was like, I’m not sure. I was still fearful, you know. About living an open life as a queer person.

MOLLY: So she moved to San Francisco.

[MUSIC]

This was 1989. For Alice, San Francisco was like a wonderland.

ALICE: It was just an opportunity to be free. You could be whoever you wanted to be there,

You see people who are you know African American, Latina, Asian American, white, like I went to those kinds of nightclubs.

I could see hundreds of other Asian American queer people. So coming to that is just kind of like, wow, you can breathe a little easier, you know.

MOLLY: Alice loved her life in the Bay Area. But there was something calling her back to academia.

ALICE: I knew that it was connected to my own history. And I was very interested in Asian American feminism.

MOLLY: So Alice moved back to Los Angeles to go to grad school.

For her PhD dissertation, she decided to write about queer women of color who were involved in activism.

But as a historian, she needed primary sources to work with. Which is where she had an issue. It was the same problem she ran into in college – there just wasn’t a lot out there about queer women of color. These stories hadn’t been recorded.

Alice was about to change all that. But little did she know, deciding to press record was just the first step.

[THEME MUSIC]

Welcome to Preserve This Podcast, a show about how to save our podcasts. I’m Molly Schwartz. This podcast is brought to you by the Metropolitan New York Library Council with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

In each episode, we’re going to teach podcasters how to preserve their podcasts. Today we’re getting to know Alice Y. Hom, one of the four indie podcast producers who are part of this project. With Alice, we’re going to be covering why preservation matters.

When Alice started her PhD research, she knew she wasn’t going to have access to the same kinds of documents that other historians have used. She would need to take a different approach.

ALICE: Because at the time there wasn’t a lot of documentation and primary sources about LGBTQ people of color, Asian American gays and lesbians, I wanted primary information and you could get that from talking to people who lived it, …. so oral history was the way in the 1990’s, the way to get information about LGBTQ people of color life.

MOLLY: So Alice started collecting the primary source materials herself. She interviewed over 50 lesbians of color.

ALICE: I was just blown away by what I was hearing from them. And I’m a wide-eyed 20-year-old hearing all this stuff that I’ve been wanting to know and learn about. What did Lesbian activists of color do previous to, you know, like the 1990s? I knew there was plenty that they did but I didn’t have access, I couldn’t read about it as much. And it was a blessing and a privilege to, you know sit in someone’s home in their living room, and have them tell me, this is what life was like as a lesbian of color in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s.

But I just knew I had to document it and collect it.

MOLLY: Alice realized that not a lot of people had paid attention to these women’s work before. And that lack of attention had been internalized.

ALICE: Inevitably whenever I did an oral history with somebody, they would say something along the lines of, I don’t know why you’re interviewing me. I didn’t really do much… and I would tell them like, oh no, this is really important or we need to know this. It’s not just famous people who should be, you know, known. It’s the people on the ground, it’s the people who were photocopying the fliers, writing the copy.

MOLLY: By talking to women that other people had overlooked, Alice uncovered pieces of history that had never been documented before.

ALICE: What I discovered was these lesbians of color, they had been involved in other social movements all along, whether they were in the peace movement, or the Black Panther party, the Young Lords… They may or may not have been able to be out as someone who’s a lesbian, gay person, queer person, transperson, etc. but they’ve always been there.

MOLLY: Documenting these stories became Alice’s passion and her life’s work.

But Alice recorded those interviews onto cassette tapes. For the past 25 years, those tapes have sat in Alice’s closet. They were disintegrating and gathering dust.

Now, Alice has pulled those tapes out of the closet. She digitized them and preserved them.

And now, she’s using them to make her first podcast. It’s called Historically Queer.

ALICE: I really wanted to make sure that a broader audience gets to hear these stories and they get to hear the people who I interviewed. Like I feel a responsibility to them, like this deep responsibility around making sure what they did doesn’t go unnoticed and doesn’t remain hidden.

MOLLY: Alice has already written academic papers. By making a podcast, she’s trying to reach an audience outside of academia.

Alice: I think for me, if I have this opportunity to share those stories, and to make them accessible to a broader audience, it will be amazing because then more and more people will feel like they belong. Like they… their lives are valuable.

MOLLY: She’s hoping to pass this perspective on to more people.

ALICE: Before we had the word intersectional, people were already living their multiple identities their lives, resisting against all the oppressions: racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, for a very long time. So that’s what I’m trying to get across with my podcast

MOLLY: Alice loves the work she’s done as an oral historian. She rescued these women’s work from obscurity. She recorded them. And she preserved them.

Which is why it’s particularly interesting that Alice hadn’t considered that she’ll need to take steps to preserve her own podcast.

And can you tell me, have you thought at all about making a preservation plan? Have you thoughts about how people will be able to access what you’re putting out now over RSS feeds in the future?

ALICE: Not at all. So when I hear about your project, it was like whaaat I didn’t, it never occurred to me, which is, I feel little sheepish about that because I’m a historian and I’m thinking about documentation.

And I think it’s because I was just assuming. And maybe wrongly so, that it’s digital. And it would always be there. you know, like my tape cassettes I was fearful that they were going to disintegrate but for some reason I just thought, well digital will always be there and it never occurred to me that there could be a breakdown.

MOLLY: Alice’s assumption is nothing to be sheepish about – it’s a widespread misconception.

But digital files DO also disintegrate. Digital audio needs to be preserved, just like a cassette tape.

We have two experts in digital audio preservation on the Preserve This Podcast team. Their names are Dana Gerber-Margie and Mary Kidd.

Dana’s a long-time podcast super-listener. She’s subscribed to over 1400 shows. And she regularly listens to 40 to 50 of them. She’s also an archivist who’s worked with audio and video.

DANA: I took an aptitude test in high school. And the aptitude test said that I should be an archivist. Seriously. And I always think back to how they described what an archivist was and how much I loved this because I LOVED X-Files. Was an archivists would save the things that would describe human kind if an alien visited planet Earth to try to explain like what we’re all about. So I always think of archives and an archivist is kind of like trying to explain what the hell we’re doing here to an alien.

MOLLY: Mary Kidd is the other archivist on the team. She’s an audio archivist and she works at the New York Public Library. When Mary was young she started making visual art on her computer.

MARY: I was illustrating, but I was using older forms of Photoshop and Paint.

MOLLY: Mary has hard drives with a little personal archive of her old illustrations. Every so often she likes to go back and look at them.

MARY: And every time I look at it the images get smaller and smaller. Like physically, they get smaller and smaller. Because our screens get larger and larger, they have higher resolution, and the photos and the illustrations that I was making in the 90s, they are literally shrinking. And each layer of technological evolution covers my creative work in this static of distortion. And it’s horrifying. It’s horrifying.

MOLLY: Time’s is also affecting podcasts. But they’re not just getting distorted like Mary’s childhood drawings. Podcasts are disappearing.

Our mission is to teach podcasters how to preserve their work. Through this podcast series, we’ll take you through the nuts and bolts of podcast preservation. Alice’s story is just one example of why preservation matters. Alice has put so much work into saving overlooked pieces of history.

But all the digital files she’s creating are at risk of becoming unplayable or disappearing.

With some basic maintenance, she can protect herself against loss.

Over the next three episodes we’re going to go over three core concepts of preservation. The first concept is file organization. The second concept is storage. And the third is metadata.

If you’d like to follow along with us, and with Alice, you can go to preservethispodcast.org. There, you’ll find a zine that Mary illustrated. It’s like a workbook to go along with the podcast. In the next episode, we’ll be starting with the exercise on page 6. And we’ll also be doing traveling workshops. You can check our website again at preservethispodcast.org to see where we’ll be next.

[MUSIC]

Oh, and don’t forget to brush up on your elevator pitch for the aliens.

ALICE: Hello Alien, I hope you’re ready to listen to something fun and learn a little bit about what happens here on earth…

KAYTLIN: Oof, if I were describe what a podcast was to an alien, Well I’ll tell you how I describe it to my father, who is a kind of alien, he was born in 1948…

DAN: I’d say I’m gonna skip the part about explaining what podcasts are and assume the alien knows relatively little about the earth…

MOLLY: If you’d like to preserve your podcast for future listeners, human and non-human alike, visit our website at preservethispodcast.org. Subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts. And please take time to rate and review our show.

Preserve This Podcast is made possible through generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It’s produced by me, Molly Schwartz, at the Metropolitan New York Library Council. There’s a whole team of people that make this podcast happen. Mary Kidd and Dana Gerber-Margie are our archivists and project co-leads. Sarah Nguyen is our assistant producer and project coordinator. Allison Behringer is the editor. Breakmaster Cylinder composed the theme music. Dalton Harts did the mixing and the mastering. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with the next episode.

[MUSIC]

Ep2—Get Organized Transcript

MOLLY: If you ask people what inspired them to get into audio storytelling, Ira Glass is usually part of the story. Dan Weissmann is no exception.

DAN: I actually met Ira Glass while we were reporting on the same high school.

MOLLY: This is back in 1992 – almost 30 years ago now. Dan was a young magazine reporter. Ira Glass was a radio reporter at WBEZ. For a few hours, they were both at Taft High School in Chicago, covering stories. A few weeks later, Dan listened to Ira’s radio piece.

IRA: All year long, the teachers see students who slouch and gossip. Students who wear clothing that teachers don’t understand. Students who need prodding and discipline and constant surveillance. And then, on prom night, the students reappear, transformed as in a dream.

DAN: I was like, oh my god, this is so good, this is so much better than what I am doing, this is so much more fun. it hadn’t occurred to me that radio could do that. It just seemed like people who did radio had all of the fun.

MOLLY: Dan decided he wanted to get in on the fun. So he started trying to make a career for himself in radio.

[THEME MUSIC]

Welcome to Preserve This Podcast, a show about how to save our podcasts. I’m Molly Schwartz. This podcast is brought to you by the Metropolitan New York Library Council with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

MOLLY: Hi again, it’s Molly Schwartz here.

If this is your first time tuning into Preserve This Podcast, I suggest you go back and start listening at the beginning. This is a five-part series where we teach podcasters how to preserve their files. In each episode we work with a different indie podcaster and walk them through one of our preservation exercises. By the end of the series, we hope every podcaster will be equipped to make a preservation plan for their files.

For this episode, we’re be focusing on Exercise 1: file organization. And we’ll be working with Dan Weissmann on his podcast An Arm and A Leg. If you’d like to follow along and do the exercises with us, you can download our zine from preservethispodcast.org. We’re starting on Page 5.

At this point Dan has been working in radio for 25 years. He’s is the kind of person who fills an awkward silence as easily as he breathes. He’s high-energy and fun to talk to. It doesn’t surprise me that radio is where Dan feels at home.

But a little over a year ago, Dan’s latest contract as a radio reporter ran out. For his entire radio career Dan has been bouncing around between contract jobs and freelance work and teaching gigs. He’s married with a young kid. He’s getting tired of the instability that’s so common in this line of work.

DAN: How do people figure it out? How do you figure out how to make a living? You know, you gotta have health insurance, you don’t want to end up in the poor house.

MOLLY: Now Dan is on a quest. He’s decided to set out on his own and start a podcast. It’s called An Arm and a Leg. And the podcast is all about one of the big questions that Dan is facing in his own life – how to figure out healthcare in America.

But this new venture is risky. I’ve noticed something about most of the indie podcasters I know who’ve been successful – they are capital O, ORGANIZED. They use spreadsheets for everything, from tracking invoices to logging tape. That’s because producing a podcast on your own, without any institutional support, requires a lot of project management. This is going to be a challenge for Dan because he’s not the most organized person. Here he is, a couple months into working on An Arm and A Leg.

DAN: I am deep deep into the shit of the project planning part of this. I’m struggling with not being overwhelmed. I have a big, kind of giant post-it with three big columns: money, engagement, editorial, and a little one that says tech.

MOLLY: Dan has a lot on his plate right now. But if he doesn’t take the time to figure out what files he has or where they are, it will be impossible to set up a preservation plan for them.

DAN: Like if I had to organize this stuff now, even this relatively simple episode for next week, I would die inside and seize up.

MOLLY: The time for Dan to get organized is now. It might be painful, but probably not as painful as he thinks. And that’s why the Preserve This Podcast team is here. To give him some guidelines on how to move forward.

Mary Kidd and Dana Gerber-Margie are two archivists working with me on Preserve This Podcast. They’ve worked with organization systems for large collections of files.

Mary explains that organization serves two main purposes: It helps you know what you have. And then it helps you find it.

MARY: If you think of all the things that you make digitally, think of that as like an ocean of stuff. And folders are kind of a way to navigate the great ocean of digital stuff.

MOLLY: Dana takes it one step further. She says that organization not only helps you find your own work – it also helps other people find your work.

DANA: I think of organization as a way to send a message to people who come after you. If you organize things in a certain way you can display how your own mind works and you can also contextualize things that way… Organization can be like breadcrumbs through a forest, you can go forward through them on a path, and then you can make your way back by following that same path.

MOLLY: There are some epic examples of how file organization can work for large-scale operations. One of them is Storycorps. StoryCorps is a non-profit organization that records hundreds of thousands of interviews across the United States.

TAMARA: Our naming convention works for us because it allows us, at a glance, to differentiate files from each other.

MOLLY: That’s Tamara Thompson. She’s an archivist at StoryCorps.

TAMARA: And also gives us information about when the interview was recorded, when the interview was created and also, where it was created. Just from the first three letters, we know from whence it came.

MOLLY: No matter how many thousands of files Storycorps collects, they always know where those files go and where to find them.

TAMARA: If you ANY have interest in finding ANYthing, at all, then it is key.

And that’s the great thing about really strong file naming conventions. That it can unite your archive in a way that makes it more accessible to you, more accessible to the public, and more easily corralled, if you will.

MOLLY: The point of preservation is that people will be able to listen to your podcast years from now – even when you’re no longer alive. A GOOD organization system will help other people, like archivists, find and understand what you’ve created.

So that’s what we’re going to do with Dan today. Get him started on the road to a good organization system. To take away some of the stress of doing it alone, I gave Dan a call to walk him through the first exercise in our Preserve This Podcast zine.

DAN: OK, your phone’s ringing…

MOLLY: Hello?

DAN: Heyyy, OK cool.

MOLLY: Again, if you’d like to follow along with us, you can download the zine at preservethispodcast.org.

DAN: My system for organizing things, is not terrible, but isn’t perfect. I would love some coaching from you in like tightening that up. Where should we start?

MOLLY: So I think we’ll start by walking through the zine together.

We start by opening up the zine to page 6. This exercise is called “Get Organized!”

DAN: My approach to file management is… I’ve tried to be as not stupid about it as possible,

MOLLY: We’ve broken organization up into two parts: folder structures and file naming. Dan and I get started with foldering. In order to create a folder structure that works for Dan, first we have to map out his current production process.

We’d like to work with Dan’s logic rather than fight it. So the first step is for Dan to think about all the steps he takes to make a podcast. And then write them down, in sentence format. Like a story.

DAN: I do interviews, which I capture on my digital recorder, and move ASAP to the external hard drive.

MOLLY: Dan is essentially mapping out his production process. And it’s pretty involved. It takes Dan 24 minutes to walk me through it.

DAN: And that’s pretty much the process.

MOLLY: Yeah, so there’s like a lot of steps in there. And you’re interacting with a lot of different technology and creating a lot of different files.

Now that Dan has written out his process, it’s time for the next step in the exercise.

Go through the narrative you just wrote and just like circle or highlight all the files.

This will help us come up with what we call a “master folder structure.” It’s like a template that he can make once and use over and over again. He can use it on his local computer drive, on his hard drive, and on shared drives like Google Drive. It’s a great way to stay organized. Dan is intrigued.

MOLLY: When you’re starting a new project, you can just copy and paste that skeleton folder structure.

DAN: I can copy a structure? How do I do that?

MOLLY: Create new folder.

DAN: Uh huh.

MOLLY: And let’s call this like episode 0. And then you go inside there and make a new folder. And then make a list of new folders,

DAN: And then I just duplicate the empty set of folders. I can right-click and duplicate the folder, and now I’ve got a new folder that’s a copy of Episode 0, but I just rename that like Episode 5, and now I’ve got that structure. You’re a genius, that’s awesome.

MOLLY: That’s a trick that Mary taught me. Yeah, no, it’s a really good one.

MOLLY: The great thing about folder structures is that they can be tailored to your working style. There’s no one right way to do it. We encourage you to follow your own narrative. Spot the patterns in the files you’re creating. And then set up a master structure that has a folder to map to each file type. We’ve laid out a sample structure on Page 8 of the zine.

DAN: I’m starting to figure out oh I need a folder for tracking, for my narration. Because it’s not just one file cuz I’ll do pickups. And then I need a folder for mixes. And then a folder for masters. Yeah so Episode One is a MESS. But I think episode 4 is gonna be less of a mess.

MOLLY: OK, so Dan did the foldering exercise.

Now it’s time to move onto the second part of “Get Organized.” This part starts on Page 9. And it’s all about figuring out a file naming convention. Which is just a formula for naming your files.

MOLLY: What is your current file naming convention?

DAN: That’s a very good question, let’s see. So ok, so the first tracking that I did is called Tracking 11142018, and then I have preserved the default file name that my recorder gives to things at the end. And then inside the folder called Pickups. These, uh, there are 1,2,3,4 and they are called uh Main Retrack 11152018 plus the Zoom name, Intro Retrack 11152018 plus the zoom names, 1115 pickups Good Take plus the zoom name.

MOLLY: Right now, Dan is naming files based on what makes sense to him in the moment, when he’s in the middle of production. But in the long term, it will be important for him to set up a system that’s consistent. Ideally, it will be a system that still makes sense to him 2 or 3 years from now.

When it comes to naming files, consistency is key.

DAN: And let’s see if that’s consistent… I have two files that are just the Zoom name, which is like Zoom0029 underscore tr1 and tr2… Yeah, it’s not great.

MOLLY: Dan knows he can make some major improvements to his file naming. Luckily, we provide a sample file naming convention on page 9. Our example starts with the year, month, and date that a file was created, all smooshed together with no spaces, then underscore, some kind of keyword to describe that file, dot the file type, so like dot wav or dot mp3.

DAN: Yeah. Your naming convention notes are smart. Oh boy. Oh. Avoid using spaces. Yeah, ugh, god.

MOLLY: It’s best to avoid spaces in file names because they make it trickier for computers to parse characters. Even though your Digital Audio Workstation and Dropbox might be happy enough working in a world of spaces, there are other systems – especially ones that are automated systems that use scripts – that will get tripped up. So it’s best to avoid them because we just can’t predict what programs we might be running our files through in the future.

DAN: So I’m a little, um scared. About how much I’ve already created without having started with smart naming conventions, without following all the good rules, cuz it’s a lot to go back and fix.

MOLLY: And that’s not necessarily the best idea.

As most audio producers know, changing a file name when you’re mid-production process can be a DISASTER. It breaks the links in your digital audio workstation session. The key with naming files is to make a formula now, and then follow that formula moving forward.

[MUSIC]

A lot of times production feels more urgent than file organization. Starting a podcast is hard. It’s even harder to be an independent podcaster, without an institution or a network handling some of the backend work.

Indie podcasters play so many different roles: they’re reporters, writers, audio engineers, accountants, social media managers, all rolled into one. And adding archivist to the list might seem like an impossible task.

But even though this will add some extra work upfront, you can do it. The main message we hope you take away is that creating routines is the answer to getting some control over your files.

And that’s what Dan is starting to do. In the couple months since we talked, he’s created new a file naming system.

DAN: So right now, every file starts with the date – year first, then month, then day. I’m separating them by dashes because it’s so much easier for me to see. Then underscore, then a descriptive title like MollySchwartzInterviewAboutDataCollectionUpdate.

MOLLY: Dan doesn’t have everything figured out yet. He’s still struggling with his folder template. But he’s made a start.

DAN: This is an ongoing task, and it never really stops.

MOLLY: Dan’s right – preservation is a process. It’s good that he’s getting organized now. Because An Arm and a Leg show has gotten hundreds of thousands of downloads. It’s gotten hundreds of five-star reviews on Apple podcasts. And they’ve gotten donations from listeners. Which means – That Dan is in production on a second season.

[MUSIC]

MOLLY: If YOU would like to preserve your podcast for future listeners, visit our website at preservethispodcast.org. Subscribe to this podcast wherever you get your podcasts. And please take some time to rate and review.

Preserve This Podcast is made possible through generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It’s produced by me, Molly Schwartz, at the Metropolitan New York Library Council. My project co-leads are Mary Kidd and Dana Gerber-Margie. Sarah Nguyen is our project coordinator. Allison Behringer is our editor. Breakmaster Cylinder composed the theme music. Dalton Harts does the mixing and the mastering and the song you hear at the outro. Austin Eustice did our logo. Noah Litvin did the website. Such special thanks as well to Jeremy Helton and Jacob Kramer Duffield. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with the next episode. Which is all about… storage.

[MUSIC]

Ep3—Back it up Transcript

MOLLY: For the past 2.5 years, Amanda McLoughlin and Julia Schiffini have been co-hosting a podcast. Late at night and on weekends, they settle back into Amanda’s couch. They each turn on a microphone. Pour themselves a cocktail. And start talking about mythology.

AMANDA: Welcome to Spirits Podcast, a boozy dive into mythology, legends, and folklore. Every week, we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world.

I’m Amanda.

JULIA: And I’m Julia.

AMANDA: And this is episode 115, the epic of Gilgamesh!

[THEME MUSIC]

Welcome to Preserve This Podcast, a show about how to save our podcasts. I’m Molly Schwartz. This podcast is brought to you by the Metropolitan New York Library Council with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

If this is your first time tuning into Preserve This Podcast, I suggest you go back and start listening at the beginning. This is a five-part series where we teach podcasters how to preserve their files.

Today we’re working with Amanda McLoughlin on a really important preservation topic: storage. We’re covering where and how to store your digital files. If you’d like to follow along and learn how to backup your files with us, you can download our zine from preservethispodcast.org. We’re starting on Page 10.

MOLLY: Amanda started the Spirits podcast with her best friend Julia Schiffini as a side project. Now, their show has over 100 episodes. And each episode gets about 20 to 30,000 downloads. She recently quit a stable day job to start a podcast production company, called Multitude.

AMANDA: Behind the scenes I do a lot of like accounting and business stuff. Like ad sales, you know keeping track of money.

I think for myself I sort of describe myself as like an internet business lady. I do a pretty good job of being the most businessy person in the room with creative people and being the most creative person in a room of business people

MOLLY: Amanda the kind of person who likes to have a plan. She stores her valuable belongings in watertight bins so that they stay dry in case of a flood.

But she doesn’t have the equivalent of a watertight bins for her podcast files.

AMANDA: I have a cloud backup and local backup, but that is about all. whenever I read articles about how digital copies are not forever, and hard drives degrade every time you write or read them, I get a little bead of sweat on the back of my neck. But it’s not a thing that we have put a lot of effort into, I think mostly because there’s no best practice yet.

I was really stoked to hear about Preserve This Podcast because I was like yes, I need to know how to do this, people need to know how to do this.

MOLLY: The key to solving Amanda’s hard drive problem will be figuring out a digital storage plan.

Mary Kidd and Dana Gerber-Margie are two archivists working with me on Preserve This Podcast. They tell me about how a box of paper files can sit up in your attic for years and be fine. But Mary explains that digital files are more high maintenance.

MARY: It’s kind of funny with digital files because unlike physical storage, like physical storage you store things in one place, but with digital storage, we encourage you to store things in multiple places. And I think that can get kind of overwhelming because then you’re managing not only ALL the stuff, but then you have to manage it in multiple spaces.

MOLLY: Digital storage is overwhelming. No wonder Amanda isn’t sure what to do.

Which brings us to a Sunday morning in December. Three members of the Preserve This Podcast team are heading up to Queens, NY. We’re on our way to Amanda’s apartment.

I was there, and so was Mary Kidd, the archivist you just heard from, and Sarah Nguyen, our Project Coordinator. [SCENE TAPE]: Hi, how’s it going I’m Amanda. Hi, I’m Molly, Sorry I’m running late.

I was there, and so was Mary Kidd, theone of the archivists you just heard from, and Sarah Nguyen, our Project Coordinator.

Amanda had picked up some bagels from down the street, as a bit of a bribe to get one of her fellow Multitude producers to join us.

ERIC: I’m Eric Silver. I am the co-producer of Join the Party and Horse, which are two podcasts that are on the Multitude audio collective. I’m the one who posts to Patreon and Libsyn and to the website. That’s why Amanda is teaching me to do this, so I don’t lose all of our stuff.

MOLLY: Amanda opens her laptop and plugs in her hard drive. Mary pulls out a couple copies of the zine. She hands them to Amanda and Eric.

MARY: Before we jump into that, how are you feeling about this whole process and any first thoughts or impressions?

AMANDA: I feel worried about being very bossy and making the other people who I work with, to being like, excuse me did you brush your teeth tonight, like excuse me are you archiving your files properly?

MARY: How, how are you feeling about this process? I’m curious.

ERIC: Ummm I’m not the most organized person. This might take a little while to get used to. But I know that it’s for the best I guess like I kind of trust G Drive and Libsyn to like be OK with our episodes. So maybe that’s me being silly that I think that Libsyn is going to take care of me.

MOLLY: Eric knows first hand that you shouldn’t trust someone else to save your work. He was working at Gothamist in 2017.

ERIC: I was being an intern, but I did write like 5 articles that I was really proud of and then of course what happened to Gothamist, it got shut down!

MOLLY: After Gothamist got shut down, the entire site went blank. All of the hundreds of articles that people had written for the publication disappeared from the web for a few days.

ERIC: The servers were down, the hosting was down. You just could not access your articles. And I thought to myself I did not save any of these. I didn’t turn them into a PDF, I don’t have them anywhere.

I mean the internet is supposed to be this boundless publishing platform, and then all of a sudden it can disappear.

MOLLY: So has Eric changed his ways and started backing up his podcast? Not exactly.

ERIC: I still don’t do it though. Which is, which I think is bad. But at the same time, I guess, since I control over my podcast, I’m not worried.

MOLLY: I hear this a lot from indie podcasters. That their content is safe because they publish it themselves. But here’s the thing: it’s just not true.

Amanda learned the hard way that platforms like Google Drive and Libsyn aren’t totally trustworthy. She’s been self-publishing content since she was in middle school.

AMANDA: I was in old-school fandom from 2001 or so.

MOLLY: Amanda was blogging on LiveJournal and posting videos on Youtube.

AMANDA: I was around for like LiveJournal deciding anything gay has to be deleted, or Delicious the bookmarking service that everyone loved, suddenly just died.

MOLLY: That’s when Amanda decided to save a copy of everything she cared about on her own computer.

AMANDA: From middle school I was like I should save a PDF file of stuff I really want to read again. The only service I can trust to keep it is, me.

MOLLY: But now that she’s running a company, she needs to extend that trust to her team.

OK, it’s time to get to work. We’re at Amanda’s kitchen table, ready to go. Well, at least some of us are ready.

ERIC: You lured me over with bagels and now I have to do filing. Internet filing. That’s the whole point of this situation isn’t it. Oh no. This feels like a trap. Regardless, this feels like a trap.

MOLLY: OHHH Eric. We’ve tried playing nice. We’ve tried giving you bagels and a fun zine and explaining that preservation is important. But it just doesn’t seem like it’s working. So I guess it’s time to resort to good old fashioned archivist SCARE TACTICS.

Mary tells Amanda and Eric to turn to page 10 of the zine.

She directs them to a URL – preservethispodcast.org/adventure. On this webpage, Amanda and Eric find a game. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure game.

Eric starts reading out loud as he scrolls through the webpage.

ERIC: Tis a sweltering, dark and stormy summer evening in July. You are a hard-working indie podcaster coming up on a deadline.

A cup of coffee is definitely in order!

You drop your cup. Coffee spills everywhere. All over you, all over the floor, and all over your laptop.

MOLLY: In this game, the fate of your podcast depends on whether or not you have a backup plan.

ERIC: To see what happens if you have a backup plan in place, click here. Otherwise, click here to see what happens to you without a backup plan in place.

MOLLY: There are multiple possible endings to this story. Some are tragic; ERIC: The coffee-soaked laptop makes a strange sputtering noise. A sound you will forever associate with a creative legacy lost.

MOLLY: Others are triumphant. Here’s Amanda.

AMANDA: To your relief, you realize that your backup drive was spared the laptop’s boiling fate. Thank the stars for my data sync you say to yourself!

ERIC: This IS high fantasy. Thank the stars!

MOLLY: As planned, our choose-your-own adventure game injects both Amanda and Eric with a healthy dose of fear. And through the game, they realize the biggest takeaway from this episode: digital information is never safe if it’s only stored in one location.

There’s actually an acronym for this that archivists use. It’s called LOCKSS - L-O-C-K-S-S. It stands for “lots of copies keep stuff safe.”

Part of what makes digital files so vulnerable is that they’re so quick to create and delete. It just take the click of a button. But the same thing that makes digital files vulnerable is the way that we’re going to keep them safe. Which is by making lots of copies and storing them in multiple places.

And Mary has a system for making this many copies. It’s something called a 3-2-1 backup plan.

MARY: That basically means that you keep three copies of your files, two of those copies should be on two separate devices, and then one copy should be far away from you.

MOLLY: So, let’s break down the 3-2-1 backup plan, going number by number. The 3 stands for 3 copies. That means that means that for all the files you care about saving, you’ll want to have 3 copies of them. That way if anything happens to one copy, or even two copies, you have a backup to your backup.

Here’s something really important to know about making copies: it’s always best to store an uncompressed version of your audio files. Uncompressed files are bigger. They include MORE DATA about your file. Wav files are uncompressed. MP3 files, on the other hand, are compressed. That means that data has been removed from the MP3 file to make it smaller – which makes it easier to store and transfer. Your human ear probably can’t tell the difference between an uncompressed audio file and a compressed audio file. That’s because compression systems were designed so that people wouldn’t be able to know the difference. But your computer can tell the difference.

Pretty much all podcasts are required to be uploaded as MP3 files. But you should still save and preserve uncompressed copies of those files. And again, those are WAV files. The more data you keep with your file, the less likely it will decay or corrupt in the future.

OK, so that’s the 3 in 3-2-1: 3 copies. Moving on to the 2. The 2 stands for 2 devices. You’ll want to store those 3 copies of your files on at least two different kinds of storage devices. There are lots of different kinds of storage devices out there. But I’m going to focus on hard drives, RAID devices, and cloud storage.

All of these storage options have different strengths and weaknesses. So which is best? Which storage device should podcasters use?

To help you decide, we’re going to play a game of storage showdown! Bam bam bam…

[GAME SHOW FX]

First up we have contestant number 1. The hard drive!

Hard drives are physical devices that you can hold. You can carry them around with you and see the physical location where your files are being stored.

They’re fairly affordable. $50 will get you a terabyte of data, which is pretty darn good. And they’re easy to use. You just connect them to your computer via USB or the internet. A lot of hard drives let you set up an automated backup, so they run in the background with little maintenance.

The fact that hard drives are physical devices is both a strength and a weakness. Sure, they’re portable, which is nice. But hard drives only stores your files in one place. And if something bad happens, like you drop your hard drive or you spill coffee on it, then all of your files are gone. And, hard drives only last about 5 years. So you need to replace them on a 5-year schedule and migrate your files over to a new device.

Now contestant #2: the RAID device! It’s a hulking device that looks like a hard drive on steroids. But it’s more than just a hard drive.

RAIDs are the kind of pro gear that archivists use. They back up your files on multiple different media. If one part fails, you’re not doomed. Which makes them safer than a hard drive.

So, what’s the downside of a RAID? Well, they’re expensive. A standard RAID can put you back about $1000. And they’re not that easy to use. Setting up a RAID device requires some tech skills and troubleshooting. A RAID would be a great match for a podcast company or network.

Now, onto contestant #3: Cloud storage

Compared to hard drives and RAID devices, cloud storage feels kind of… magical. It’s free or low-cost. It makes your files accessible from any computer. Cloud services store data in a bunch of different place around the world, which creates redundancies that keep your files safer.

Almost everyone who makes a podcast today uses some kind of cloud storage: whether it’s Dropbox, Google Drive, or Amazon S3. Or cloud storage that’s more designed to backup your files, like Backblaze and Carbonite.

But the truth is, the name “cloud storage” is pretty misleading. Cloud storage isn’t vapory or ethereal. Data stored in the cloud isn’t stored somewhere in the sky.

Data that’s stored “in the cloud” is just stored on other people’s computers. “The cloud” is all around us. It’s in buildings, and on servers. The tallest data center in the world, where some of the cloud lives, is right next to the Brooklyn Bridge.

But what makes the cloud convenient also makes it dangerous. With cloud storage, we’re relying on a third party to store our files. And that leaves so much outside of our control.

We have very little information about where our data is being stored or whether a service is changing the metadata. And, perhaps the most dangerous thing about the cloud, is that most cloud services are based on a monthly subscription fee. So once you stop paying that monthly bill for the cloud, you lose access to your files. And eventually they’ll get deleted.

So while there’s a lot of good things that the cloud does, it’s just not safe to to rely on the cloud as your only backup.

PULL GAMESHOW MUSIC BACK IN, MAYBE SLOWED DOWN

I’m gonna be honest, there’s no real winner in this storage showdown. The hard drive, the RAID, and cloud storage all do different things well.

That’s why the key to backing up your files is to diversify across different kinds of devices. Something can always go wrong with any one storage device. But if you store your files in different places, it’s unlikely that everything will go wrong on every device at once.

So, to recap. The 3 in 3-2-1 means three copies of your file. The 2 means two devices.

Which brings me to the 1. The ONE means you should store one copy of your files in a place that is geographically far away from you. Now, cloud storage companies could be storing your files far away from you. But, it’s not a guarantee. I live in New York City, and it’s entirely possible that Dropbox is storing my data on servers that are in New York City. So in the hypothetical that a major flood hits NYC, like what happened during Hurricane Sandy, my cloud storage isn’t going to save me.

Alright, so now the logistics of it all. If you’re ready to set yourself up with a 3-2-1 backup plan, but you’re wondering exactly how to do it, you can follow Mary’s example.

Mary is an archivist by day, but she’s an illustrator by night. She even illustrated our Preserve This Podcast zine. She creates her artwork on her home computer, that she shares with her husband Brian, who’s a musician. Between the two of them, they create a lot of files.

Mary uses a 3-2-1 backup plan for the files that she and Brian make on their home computer. Here’s how she does it:

MARY: We have a backup hard drive. A new one. So we back up to that once a day… And that’s automated.

MOLLY: Every night, Mary’s computer is backed up to this drive. Mary uses Apple Time Machine on her Mac to schedule a daily backup, but you can also do this on Windows by setting up a backup in the System and Security section of Control Panel. So that’s one copy of Mary and Brian’s files on one device.

MARY: I also sync up to dropbox, so I pay for about a terabyte’s worth of storage.

MOLLY: That’s a second copy backing up on a second device – a cloud storage service. Now we’re just missing a third copy in a geographically distant location.

MARY: I have what is called a backup cloner, a hard drive cloner. You press a button, and it clones that data over to the other drive.

MOLLY: Hard drive cloners are inexpensive and super handy. They let you duplicate everything on your hard drive onto a second hard drive with the click of a button.

MARY: And those drives. One I keep in my office at NYPL. And the other I chuck across on the other side of the continent to my brother.

MOLLY: There, she did it! Mary keeps a third copy of her files on another hard drive, which she mails to her brother in Oregon. The drive in Oregon isn’t always up-to-date. Mary backs it up about once every six months when she goes out to visit, using her cloner.

MARY: In case something were to happen in New York City, it’s on the West Coast. Unless there’s some sort of like solar flare event. Then I’m really screwed. (laughter)

MOLLY: Preservation is all about preventing risk. Mailing a hard drive to Oregon might seem kind of extreme. But the truth is – natural disasters can and do happen. Archivists are always imaging the worst case scenario. It gives the profession something of a reputation for being gloomy – who wants to think about floods and fires on a regular basis?

Amanda doesn’t need any convincing though – she’s a planner, so she’s already thinking about floods. But the choose-your-own-adventure game showed Eric what can go wrong. And it did scare him a little bit. It makes him think about things differently. He comes up with a solution for how Multitude can start a 3-2-1 backup plan for its podcast files – by sending a second hard drive to live with his mom in Nashville, Tennessee

AMANDA: Just to have a second place?

ERIC: Yeah, that’s a good idea.

MOLLY: That will keep it safe from any natural disasters that hit the New York City area.

[MUSIC]

Now Amanda and Eric know what they need to do with Multitude’s files. The next step will be actually doing it.

It’s been 3 months since we did these exercises with Amanda and Eric. Since then, they’ve made a start.

AMANDA: We have taken some of these preservation lessons to heart and I definitely name my files with underscores now because I know that that is important.

And Eric got an external hard drive. He’s formatted it and synced it to his laptop. And he set up a back-up on the cloud, using Backblaze. But Eric has been very honest with us that this process has not been easy. It’s taken him 3 weeks and cost $100 for a new 4-terabyte hard drive to get this whole system in place.

ERIC: This whole thing has been such a slog, but, finally, I can take things off of my working computer, and it is on a hard drive, and it is also on Backblaze. So I have two places that it’s backed up, I can also put it on Google Drive if I really want to.

Digital preservation is a process of constant maintenance and migration. All the backups in the world are just temporary protections against the inevitable: which is that all of our computers and hard drives will die eventually, just like any machine. We can expect storage devices to live reliably for about 5 years. Which means you should be migrating your files over to a new hard drive every 5 years.

It takes some extra work. But in the end, it will be worth it. Because the alternative is that we lose what a lot of people are calling the golden age of podcasting.

MARY: Yes it’s kind of annoying and it takes time to do it, but it’s also this way to communicate to people in the future. To aliens or to future researchers or scholars who come across your work. What you’re creating is really really important. Podcasts are this kind of new cultural expression of, of our generation. And this is one way to sort of validate that.

MOLLY: Think of these preservation sessions as a chance to reflect back on your work. Be proud of of what you’ve created. Maybe throw yourself a party every time you migrate your files – or invite your friends to come over and do it with you. Because if there’s anything I’ve learned from Amanda, it’s that podcasting is a career that can be done with friends.

AMANDA: It was so clear from day one: the community around this medium was soooo incredible… It’s been really transformative, the bulk of my social circle now, are people I’ve met through podcasting. I can’t imagine what my life would be like now if we had never gotten into this.

MOLLY: If you would like to preserve your podcast for future listeners, visit our website at preservethispodcast.org. Subscribe to this podcast wherever you get your podcasts. And please take some time to rate and review our show. Preserve This Podcast is possible through generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It’s produced by me, Molly Schwartz, at the Metropolitan New York Library Council. Our archivists and project co-leads are Mary Kidd and Dana Gerber-Margie. Sarah Nguyen is our project coordinator. Allison Behringer is our story editor. Breakmaster Cylinder composed the theme music. Dalton Harts did the mixing and the mastering. Austin Eustice did our logo. Noah Litvin did the website. Such special thanks as well to Jeremy Helton, Jacob Kramer Duffield, and the whole Metro team. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with episode four. And we’re getting into… metadata!

Ep4—Metadata Meta-Awareness Transcript

MOLLY: On a hot afternoon in July, I visited Kaytlin Bailey at her tiny apartment in Greenwich Village. There were bookshelves covering the walls. I scanned some of the titles – “Love For Sale.” “Taking the Crime out of Sex Work.” “Sex Workers Unite.” Kaytlin uses these books to do research for her podcast.

KAYTLIN: Every person on this planet knows might even possibly love somebody that has done some kind of sex work at some point in their life… we call it the oldest profession. It’s all kinds of people who have been doing all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons forever.

Listening to this podcast makes people that participate in this industry understand the richness of their own history and can give people the strength to come out. I think that we need to have an experience like what happened with the LGBT movement, is that the reason people believe all these false narratives about sex work is they don’t think they know a sex worker.

MOLLY: Kaytlin agreed to participate in our podcast preservation curriculum. I made this trip to her apartment to learn more about her and why she makes her podcast. Kaytlin told me that she’s a comedian and an amateur historian, and a former sex worker. This podcast is a space where it all comes together for her. KAYTLIN: Welcome back to the OLDEST PROFESSION PODCAST, an irreverent history of audacious whores. Today, we are talking about every old pro’s hero, Marilyn Monroe.

[THEME MUSIC]

Welcome to Preserve This Podcast, a show about how to save our podcasts. I’m Molly Schwartz. This podcast is brought to you by the Metropolitan New York Library Council with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

MOLLY: Hi, it’s Molly here again. If this is your first time tuning into Preserve This Podcast, I suggest you go back and start listening at the beginning. This is a five-part series where we teach podcasters how to preserve their files. In the last two episodes, we focused on things that podcasters can do on their own – things like naming conventions and backing up hard drives.

In these next two episodes, I’m still gonna give you some tips for how to practice good personal digital hygiene. But I’m also going to go big picture on podcast systems.

[MUSIC]

Today, we’re tackling metadata. We’re giving Kaytlin some advice on how to use metadata to preserve her podcast.

Metadata is any information that describes what’s inside a file. So I want you to think about it like an access point into a file. Which is why I’m gonna be talking a lot about how metadata helps with podcast preservation AND podcast accessibility. And it makes sense that we think of about preservation and accessibility together because preservation and access are just two sides of the same coin. In order for a podcast to be preserved, we need to ensure its long-term accessibility. All the metadata we create to help with preservation also has the added bonus of making your podcast more accessible TODAY. And also more discoverable.

If you’d like to follow along, you can download our zine from preservethispodcast.org. We’re starting on Page 12.

[PAGE FLIP]

Kaytlin’s really passionate about her podcast. She’s read a lot of academic books and articles about the history of sex work. She wants to make these little-known histories more accessible to a broader audience.

KAYTLIN: A lot of academic writing is written for other academics, and so I feel like a bit of a popular interpreter that I sort of like suffer through research that is being done by folks and then try to translate those stories. I know how isolating the shame, stigma, and silence is of being a sexual minority and a member of a criminalized population, so just the specific, citable, referenceable knowledge that there are people that came before you, I think can be, can alleviate a lot of emotional suffering.

Kaytlin takes her job as a popular interpreter seriously. She presents dense information in a way that’s funny and relatable.

But… her podcast is made up of digital audio files.

Kaytlin can as great of a storyteller as she wants. These stories won’t be accessible in the long term if she doesn’t pay attention to the technical needs of her podcast. Which isn’t something she enjoys.

KAYTLIN: I don’t know how to get the podcast on the internet and I certainly don’t know how to preserve things on the internet. I just discovered like 48 hours ago that not all of my tweets are available from forever ago and had like a panic attack about that. So i don’t know how the internet works, I don’t know how archiving works, so this is actually one of the reasons why I reached out to you is I think it would be deeply ironic if a project born from the impulse to stop the erasure of history got erased because I’m dumb with technology.

MOLLY: Yeah no, we’re all in that boat. I’m going to be on this journey with you [laughter] So, do you feel like you can access all of your past podcast episodes and where would you go to get them?

KAYTLIN: yeah, I would go to iTunes and if that didn’t work, I would email Mary, probably drunk. Yeah that’s my whole plan.

MOLLY: Mary is Kaytlin’s old producer. Now she has a producer named Justine.

So they’re not anywhere like on your computers, your hard drives?

KAYTLIN: I think that they are on possibly Mary and possibly Justine’s computers and archives, but I don’t know that for sure. Or even what that means exactly. MOLLY: If Kaytlin really wants to make the stories in her podcast to make these stories accessible, then her actual podcast needs to be accessible. Which is why we’re we focusing on metadata.

Metadata is the information that’s attached to Kaytlin’s MP3 files. The more descriptive and accurate that information is, the more it will make these files accessible.

That’s because metadata lets us know what’s inside a file, at a glance. Without opening it up. Here’s Mary Kidd, one of our archivists.

MARY: That’s what metadata is, it’s just kind of like a label on a package that you’re sending out in the mail. It’s the address and it doesn’t tell you exactly what’s actually inside of the box, but it does tell you something about it.

MOLLY: The actual audio inside of an MP3 file is like the inside of a package. And the data we have about that MP3 file – data like the date it was created, or the file type. These are all metadata. They’re like the address stamped on the outside of a package.

Dana Gerber-Margie, our other archivist, gives an example of how this works.

DANA: I take a lot of photos on my phone and it backs up to Google photos… I don’t really care about the aperture and stuff that is in the metadata. But Google still is trying to impose order. There’s an album of things, there’s an album of places, there’s an album of people’s faces. So it’s like even when I chose not to, Google still tries. They like auto-create all of this stuff.

MOLLY: Metadata captures information about how and when a file was created – like the way Google was encoding what kind of aperture Dana used to take her photos.

Without metadata, audio files are kind of like a black box. We don’t what sounds are inside an MP3 file until we click on the file and open it up. But we need a reason to know why we should click on it in the first place. We need a reasons to listen. Metadata give us those reasons. It tells us what a podcast is about. And who made it. And when they made. All of this information is attached to the file as metadata. And all these little metadata provide access points into the black box.

[MUSIC]

For those of you who are thinking – I don’t create metadata. And yet I know what’s in my MP3s and I share them around and people click on them – you’re wrong. You are creating metadata, you’re just doing it without realizing it. And your computer is doing a lot of it for you.

We’re going to show you how to create some metadata, intentionally. You know BEST what’s inside our MP3 files. You should take any opportunity you have to self describe your content.

So, here are some tips for getting the most out of your metadata.

There are two places you can create metadata about podcast files. One is inside of the MP3 files you create. And the other is inside of the RSS feed. The RSS feed kind of wraps around your MP3 file, and distributes it to podcatchers. I’m gonna walk you through some best practices for doing both kinds of metadata entry – MP3 metadata, and RSS metadata.

So let’s start with MP3 files. All MP3 files have built-in space for metadata. It’s written into the code of the file format. These spaces are called ID3 tags. Podcasters can edit these ID3 tags directly.

But a lot of podcasters don’t. And by not filling this in, they’re missing an opportunity to help with preservation and accessibility.

If anyone is listening to a podcast outside of an app or a streaming player, then it’s the ID3 tags that make the episode title and artist and description show up properly.

If you want an example of the difference between a file that has ID3 tags filled in versus one that doesn’t, you can go to preservethispodcast.org. Download our episode 3 and then download our episode 4. Open them up on your own computer on iTunes. See if you can tell which one I’ve edited the ID3 tags on.

[MUSIC]

There are a couple of ways you can fill out these ID3 tags.

One way is to encode metadata into an MP3 file when you bounce it out from a digital audio workstation – also known as a DAW. A lot of DAWs have a form where you can encode metadata in the export process. But not all of them do. I use Reaper, and when I render a file as an MP3, it doesn’t let me encode ID3 tags.

If your DAW doesn’t let you encode ID3s, there are a couple of workarounds. One option is to edit ID3 tags using tools that were made for doing this. A couple examples are ID3 Editor, MP3Tag, and Tagr.

I prefer a different option. Which is to encode my ID3 tags in Audacity. Audacity is a free DAW that anyone can download. I just render the final version of my episode as an uncompressed WAV file, then open it in Audacity. Then I export it as an MP3 from Audacity. I personally just find it easier to do it this way. During the export process, a window pops up that lets me encode the ID3 tags. In the space where it says Artist Name, I fill out my name. Where it says Track Title, I fill out the name of my Episode Title. Album Title is the name of my podcast. Track Number is the episode number. Year is the year I’m posting it. Genre is Podcast. The Comments is a space where I can put an episode description.

[END MUSIC]

Let’s show Kaytlin how to put this into practice. Mary created this text MP3 file. It’s a recording of her talking about her favorite flavors of seltzer water.
MARY: Love seltzer, drink it pretty much everyday…

MOLLY: Then Mary shows Katelyn how to view the metadata attached to this MP3.

They open the file in VLC, an audio player. Then they click “Window” in VLC’s top navigation bar. Then they selecting “Media Information.” You can also do this on iTunes by dragging an MP3 into the iTunes library, then right click on it, and selecting “Song info”. In both cases, a form pops up.

MARY: So, what you’re seeing here is a form, and this form corresponds to what are known as ID3 tags that live inside of an MP3.

MOLLY: Mary had already filled out some of the fields on her seltzer MP3. Like the episode title and description. But some of the fields were still blank.

MARY: So these are basically fields that you can fill out, so why don’t you just go ahead and fill out some fields here?

KAYTLIN: Artist,

MARY: Artist, obviously

KAYTLIN: Mary…

MARY: Me.

KAYTLIN: Right. Album, I would say “Thoughts on… ” I would say thoughts on… Description: Mary, a working artist, shares her thoughts and experience with seltzer…

MARY: A working artist, oh wow.

MOLLY: Kaytlin tries to save metadata she’s created. But an error message pops up.

KAYTLIN: Error! Uh oh. Error while saving meta. VLC was unable to save the metadata. This would be the point where I would throw computer out of the window and leave.

MARY: Actually don’t throw the computer out yet. Click on OK. Shut down VLC and re-open it.

MOLLY: When Kaytlin re-opens the file, she sees the description has changed back to Mary’s original description.

MARY: And it says, encoded by iTunes.

MOLLY: This took us by surprise. This was not how we thought this exercise would go.

MOLLY: What?

MARY: This might be an iTunes thing that’s like over-writing the metadata fields…

K: So like it didn’t save my title, it didn’t save my artist, it didn’t save my genre, it didn’t save my description. And it put its own shit in there.

MARY: I have a feeling iTunes is over-writing metadata fields.

K: Well Apple is over-writing a lot in our lives. So that makes perfect sense. MARY: Again, our fate in the hands of…

K: Some company making choices we don’t understand based on principles we don’t respect. It’s starting to make the kind of fatalism of comedians, of like I produce stuff. Maybe someone will save it. Maybe they won’t. I’ll do more drugs. Like make a little more sense to me, because there’s kind of a fatalism as that technology outpaces our individual ability to keep up with it.

This whole experience with iTunes over-writing metadata was weird. But it’s actually a great lesson. Whenever we upload our MP3 files to a podcast host, they get re-processed. Sometimes, that changes the file. And it’s possible that the reprocessing could change the metadata.

Once your podcast is out on the internet, it’s out there. We can’t guarantee that someone won’t process it or download it or strip the metadata.

But, no matter what, when you fill out ID3 tags, YOU will always have that information on you file on your OWN computer. It’ll give you context about your files years from now, when what you’ve created isn’t fresh in your mind.

And there’s a good chance it will stick with your file when other people download it. And I can guarantee you that if you don’t encode ID3 tags, then that information DEFINITELY won’t be there.

So these ID3 tags will come in handy first of all for you, and second of all anyone who listens to your file outside of an app or streaming services. Just ask anyone who listens to MP3s the old-school way, by downloading them onto their computer or… iPod.

[MUSIC]

I know that ID3 tagging sounds time intensive. But it really only takes a few minutes. I’ve started doing it. In fact, I left a little surprise in the metadata for this episode. If you download the MP3 of this podcast episode from our website, preservethispodcast.org, just open it in VLC or iTunes, you’ll be able to see the surprise that I left there.

OK, so that’s a little bit about how to edit MP3 metadata. Now we’re going to get into the metadata stored in RSS feeds.

Think of your RSS feed like a cocoon of text that wraps around your MP3 file. This text includes information about what your MP3 file is and where it came from. That text is, of course, metadata. Then podcatchers, like Apple Podcasts and Stitcher and RadioPublic, use the metadata in your RSS feed to deliver your podcast to the people who subscribe to it.

Podcast RSS feeds need to follow specific metadata formats. If they don’t follow these formats, then podcatchers won’t be able to grab them. Which means people won’t subscribe and listen! So it’s very important stuff.

Apple Podcasts has been the one setting the metadata standards for RSS. That’s because it’s been the most popular podcatcher since the birth of podcasting – it still gets around 70% of the podcast listening market.

So everyone just follows their RSS feed standards. But you might be thinking to yourself, how does that metadata get there?

That’s where podcast hosting platforms come in. If you don’t self-host your podcast, you’re using a hosting platform. Most of them charge a monthly fee. Kaytlin uses Libsyn. She likes using it to get stats about who’s listening.

KAYTLIN: This is the Libsyn thing. So we can see we have a listener in Nigeria which is exciting because we’re doing an episode on sex work in colonial Nigeria, Uganda… Russia, we have 6 listeners which is very exciting. China, 3. Australia, 222. That’s cool, and then here in the U.S…

A really important things that these hosts do is fill in the RSS metadata fields for you. This happens when you upload your file.

So, where does the host get the data? I mean, Libsyn doesn’t know what’s inside Kaytlin’s audio files.

Well, Kaytlin gives that information to them.

This is important. When you upload your file to a podcast host – this is the second place that you’re touching metadata. The first place was the ID3 tags, so in the MP3 file itself. The second place is in the RSS feed, when you do the upload.

Every time we upload a podcast episode, we’re required to fill out some information. You should fill out all the fields that your host lets you – even the optional ones, like keywords and copyright information.

The most important fields to focus on here are the episode title and the episode description. Google’s search engine has started scraping podcast episode descriptions to deliver its search results. Which means if you have a good episode description, it makes it a lot more likely that your podcast will come up when someone search for something related to it.

Right now, search algorithms can read text. But they can’t read audio. That means if you want your audio files to come up in search results, there needs to be text attached to the audio file. The text is attached to the file as metadata. That’s why the text you enter in when you upload your file is so important for discoverability. It’s the only place that you can control whether or not your podcast pops up in search results.

Include ANY words that you think people might type into Google to look for content like yours.

Think of writing a good description like sending off your podcast with a kiss. Bye podcast, have fun trip on the internet. Make a lot friends.

They grow up so fast!

[MUSIC]

The Preserve This Podcast team basically had goal when it comes to metadata: we want to empower podcasters to edit their own metadata. And show them that they can use this metadata to make their files accessible, now and in the future. The power of metadata is that it lets you self-describe your content. When software systems auto-generate that content, they’re taking away some of that power from you.

In general, everything on the web is moving in the direction of auto-generated metadata that’s created by machine learning. Imagine if a recommendation algorithm, powered by machine learning, started tagging Kaytlin’s podcast. What kind of keywords would it come up with? Would it represent sex workers as criminals? Would it flag Kaytlin’s use of the word “whore” as a derogatory term, even though Kaytlin uses it affectionately?

I personally feel more comfortable with podcasters designating their own keywords.

Mary and I sat down to talk about this conundrum.

MARY: You realize that metadata was not put into like a file structure for the purpose of preservation and archiving. It was put there for other reasons. And so the fact that you can’t like toggle a button that says like, OK lock this metadata down, do not override this metadata. You have that option with other formats. For example, a floppy disk has this little tab you can move over with your finger and that will lock it down. Like if you put it into a drive that drive can’t override any data in that disk. you can’t do that with metadata, and that’s a fundamental flaw.

MOLLY: Right now so much happens on the back end. We don’t really feel confident telling you that you metadata that will stick with your file as it goes through all these software systems.

But we came to a conclusion that there is another metadata tool out there. It’s a really good way to make your podcast more accessible. And it’s something that has nothing to do with tags in MP3 files or in RSS feeds. I’m talking about transcripts.

MARY: And transcriptions don’t live in any sort of like prescribed ID3 field or you know, metadata field in like a WAV file. They kind of sit outside of the file. Maybe one day there will be a place to put it in the file, but I don’t know if I would trust that. As long as it’s kind of like sitting on its own island and you can locate it very easily, then that is a lot more reliable than these sort of like fickle fields.

MOLLY: Transcripts could be the answer to our podcast metadata problem.

Transcripts are metadata. They provide machine-readable information about an audio file. They are information you provide, about your files, that will get scraped by search engines and deliver your podcast in search results.

They’re not attached directly to the file, like most metadata is. Which leaves it up to podcasters to link the audio file and the transcript together.

Most people do this by posting the file and the transcript together on their website. That’s what we do.

Having more transcripts will make podcasts more accessible. It will make them accessible to to search engines, to screen readers, and to people speaking English as a second language.

Which seems like a good thing. What podcaster doesn’t want more people to listen to their show?

Well, for Kaytlin, it actually gets complicated. She wants people to find her show, but she’s nervous about attaching transcripts.

The transcripts that would make her files more discoverable to listeners would also make them more discoverable to people who might want to censor her work.

That’s a real possibility now. Because of a law called SESTSA-FOSTA, which is cracking down on sex-work related media on the web.

KAYTLIN: The passage of SESTA-FOSTA provides the legal cover for the like seizure, erasure, locking out of a lot of this stuff. And so, I mean, there is a way to interpret through the law as it is broadly written that this podcast is quote unquote promoting prostitution, and that could justify a legal seizure and erasure of my work.

This whole episode, we’ve been treating discoverability as something that every podcaster wants. As an unqualified good thing. But we hadn’t thought about transcripts being used as tools of surveillance and policing – like they could be in Kaytlin’s case.

Kaytlin’s aware of the potential consequences. But she’s still thinking about posting transcripts. If anything, SESTA-FOSTA has just made her feel more determined to preserve her podcast.

KAYTLIN: It provides a sense of urgency behind trying to capture as much of this history as I can and trying to disseminate it as much as possible, because although websites can be seized, and audio files can be erased, you can’t take information out of people’s heads. So the more people that are listening to the podcasts, the more people that know these stories, then I imagine sort of playing a game of multi-generational telephone with these stories.

[MUSIC]

Podcast technology and search algorithms and speech-to-text software are all changing quickly. They’ll determine how podcasts get discovered in the future. We as individual creators don’t have much control over how that stuff works. We don’t even have that much information about them.

But WE do know, as individual creators, is what the podcasts we’re making are all about. We should take every opportunity we have to self-describe our content. That means taking the time to edit ID3 tags, write good episode descriptions, and make transcripts.

I, for one, hope that I can still find today’s podcasts years from now. I can totally see future Molly listening to Kaytlin wax poetic about 16th century sex workers.

KAYTLIN: My patron saint is Veronica Franco. So Veronica Franco is one of the first published women in the western canon as a poet, she was a courtesan in the 16th century Venice…

MOLLY: If you would like to preserve your podcast for future listeners, visit our website at preservethispodcast.org. Subscribe to this podcast wherever you get your podcasts. And please take some time to rate and review our show.

Preserve This Podcast is made possible through generous funded from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It’s produced by me, Molly Schwartz, at the Metropolitan New York Library Council. There’s a whole team of people that make this podcast happen. There’s our project leads Mary Kidd and Dana Gerber-Margie. Sarah Nguyen is our project coordinator. Allison Behringer is our story editor. Breakmaster Cylinder composed the theme music. Dalton Harts did the mixing and mastering and the music in the outro. The musice in this episode is by Breakmaster Cylinder and Bluedot Sessions. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with episode five. And we’re getting into… RSS.

[OUTRO MUSIC]

Ep5—RSS Resuscitations Transcript

Over the past two years, Mary, Dana, and I have had a lot of phone calls about aboutpreservation On one of the calls, Dana told us that she used to have a podcast.

DANA: The Podcast was called Sound of the Archives. I did the tenth episode, and then I meant to do an eleventh episode and then I think another year went by and I finally recognized that I wasn’t going to work on it again and I didn’t want to.

MOLLY: When Dana stopped making her podcast, she decided to stop paying Libsyn $5 a month to host it. One month later, she looked for her podcast in Pocket Casts. And a message popped up that said ‘Podcast Not Found’.

DANA: I thought it was just widely available. And I did not know until I took it down, that that meant it was down for the count, like it was down for all of the internet.

MOLLY: Dana was facing a problem that a lot of podcasters have faced. She didn’t realize that when she stopped paying Libsyn, she was killing her podcast at the root. And that to keep that to keep that root alive would cost money.

[THEME MUSIC]

Welcome to the fifth and final episode of Preserve This Podcast. Today, we’re diving into RSS and trying to get an answer to an important question: When you’re finished making a podcast or when you don’t want to pay for hosting, how do you ensure that the podcast will live on?

For this episode, instead of working with a podcaster, we’re turning the magnifying glass on ourselves. And what we need to do to preserve the Preserve This Podcast podcast.

[MUSIC]

Preserve this Podcast – our podcast – is a perfect case study for this question of what to do with your podcast after it’s done.

And that’s because a limited-run show – there’re only going to be 5 episodes. And we’re grant funded. (Thanks Mellon Foundation!). Which means we only have funding to pay an RSS hosting platform until the end of January 2020.

That’s right people – we’re at a big risk of disappearing!

The reason why so many podcasts disappear from the ether is because they are distributed via RSS feed. And that feed pulls from one source. And a lot of times people are paying a monthly fee to that RSS hosting platform. And if they ever stop paying the fee – then the podcast goes dark. It disappears from all the podcatchers.

Which means that RSS feeds play a crucial role in the podcast technology ecosystem. But RSS feeds were built for sharing content, not for saving content.

[MUSIC]

So why are podcasts on RSS anyway?

To understand why, we need to go back to the year 2000 and talk to a man named Dave Winer.

DAVE: I think I’m not gonna wear the headphones.

Streaming music and video on the web took a long time back then. Bandwidth speeds were slow.

DAVE: You’d have these tiny little postage stamp size videos, and you’d click to watch it and you’d wait five minutes. And you’d get ten seconds worth of video.

Dave Winer called this the “click-wait” problem. Cuz you’d click on a file, and then just wait for it to load.

He got to work on something that could solve the click-wait problem.

DAVE: It could be that your computer is downloading the audio or video without you even knowing that it’s doing it, and you don’t get presented any of this stuff until it’s fully loaded already available on your hard drive. That was the idea. And now there’s no more click-wait problem, you click, it shows up.

MOLLY: He wrote code that could deliver MP3 files over an RSS format. With this code, anyone could send MP3 files over RSS. This, in many ways, was the birth of podcasting.

The people coding RSS feeds weren’t thinking about preservation or longevity of files. They were thinking about SPEED! And how to deliver files quickly.

A year later, Apple came out with the iPod… and the rest is history. Say hello to iPod broadcasts. Or, podcasts.

[MUSIC FADE OUT]

JASON: They’re calling them podcasts, and I inherently, and to this day, think the name is stupid.

MOLLY: You might remember that voice from our Prologue.

JASON: My name is Jason Scott and I’m the free-range archivist at the internet Archive in San Francisco, known to most people as the Wayback Machine.

MOLLY: Jason Scott is the one who built the Podsucker in his basement. He used it to download hundreds of thousands of podcast episodes in 2005 to save them from disappearing.

JASON: You had these servers that would go up, they were very expensive. They might disappear because funding went away or the school decided they didn’t want it. So I was used to stuff disappearing, and if you didn’t keep a local copy, you were screwed…

MOLLY: Jason had been watching people post serialized audio on the web since the mid 90s. These were proto-podcasts. But then everything changed when people started using RSS feeds.

JASON: Now you don’t have to go to the site, because RSS is kind of taking over. And you would have this feed be either at a service, or be located on a website, or be on a blog, and people were basically providing it as, go here, download it with your client, and then here’s the stuff to play.

MOLLY: The RSS feed made it a lot easier for podcast creators to share their content. But creating and maintaining the RSS feed became a job in and of itself – a job that podcasters started paying companies to do for them.

JASON: There are companies like Libsyn that are podcast hosts, I have no idea what their long-term policy is, I don’t know if they’ve allied with any archives. I doubt it. I mean I don’t trust anybody. But, never have! So that’s how I ended up with hundreds of thousands of episodes.

I talked to Elsie Escobar who works at Libsyn:

MOLLY: And I was wondering, what’s the point of a podcaster using a hosting platform like Libsyn? Like why don’t people just make their own RSS feeds and host them themselves.

ELSIE: Oh my gosh. Because it’s really hard to make an RSS feed and host it yourself. That’s why Libsyn started, essentially it was one of those things where they started to recognize that there was a problem with people who wanted to do this podcast where they didn’t know where to put the media. Like the media files needed to live somewhere right? And it needed to be delivered via this RSS feed. And most people didn’t know exactly how to do it, it was like you literally had to hand code your feed. It wasn’t necessarily accessible for the layperson, if you will, during that time. Even the most techie person to start to do it that way, it was time-intensive to update all the stuff, to make sure that it didn’t break.

[MUSIC]

The internet is a world of constant maintenance. Server space has to be paid for.

Podcast hosting companies need to charge podcasters money. Because the hosts are paying other companies. Companies like Amazon and Google. They’re paying them for storage space to store your audio. And they’re paying bandwidth providers to transfer the data.

Here’s Brad Smith, the CEO of Simplecast.

BRAD: Every time somebody download something we pay for every byte of data transferred. Like we are a podcast analytics and hosting service. The two things that cost us the most money are our analytics and the server farm, and all the databases and elastic search that runs that. And then just the core cost of streaming.

MOLLY: Brad explains that how much money it costs them to host a podcast depends on the podcast.

BRAD: We have some shows that cost us thousands of dollars a month.

MOLLY: So that’s why there are those monthly fees.

I talked to Elsie from Libsyn about what happens when a podcaster stops paying.

ELSIE: If the show is closed the content is pulled offline at the end of that current month… And so you do have to, as somebody who’s had this account, download all your content. If you don’t have a local copy already… But if you don’t, then you definitely need to do that because there’s not going to be a copy kept for you at the end of that month.

[MUSIC FADES OUT]

MOLLY: Did you hear what Elsie said? If you’re going to close your hosting account, DOWNLOAD all of your content. Save all your stuff. Which, since you’ve made it to episode five of this podcast, you already know is something you should do.

I do want to emphasize something here, though. In archives, we have these terms for different kinds of digital files. There are preservation master copies, and then there are access copies. Preservation masters are high-quality versions of the original file – it’s uncompressed, it’s stored safely in multiple places. The access copy is the version that you share around with other people. In an archival setting, the archivists will save the preservation master of an audio file in their repository, and then they might post a compressed access copy on their website.

Think about the MP3 files that you upload to your RSS feed as the access copy of your podcast. Throughout Preserve This Podcast curriculum, we’ve taught you how to save a master preservation copy. And that should always live as an uncompressed file, on your own devices.

Now, after you stop paying, every company has different policies for how long they’ll hold onto your files. Brad told me that Simplecast will hold onto files for 90 days after payments lapse. They they purge the podcast from its system.

For Libsyn, it depends where you hit them in their quarterly cycle of weeding out files:

ELSIE: Media files are purged on a quarterly basis… like two months later, it might still be there because we purged those servers every quarter. But you can’t guarantee that, like we don’t guarantee that it will be there, that’s like oh my gosh, thank god you still have it – kind of stuff.

MOLLY: The lapsed payments and the purged podcasts – these are big reasons why podcasting is a particularly fragile medium.

It’s hard to get exact numbers, but we know that a lot of podcasts are disappearing. Amplifi Media did a study showing that an estimated 75% of all podcasts ever made have podfaded. They’re no longer in production. And when people stop producing a podcast, they usually stop paying their podcast host, and those podcasts disappear.

That’s a lot of lost podcasts.

All this brings us to our big question for this episode: When you’re finished making a podcast and don’t want to pay for hosting, how do you ensure that the podcast will live on?

There are a couple of places that will host your content for you, for free. They won’t distribute it to podcatchers. But they’ll give you a place for your episodes to live online.

One of those places is the Internet Archive. That’s where Jason Scott works.

JASON: The Internet Archive is a fun non-profit that has many many petabytes of disk space and will happily take these items, and by my estimate, at least 3 or 4000 episodes go up every month onto the archive. It’s a pleasure to put them up, we’re up to around 320,000 episodes up there.

MOLLY: I figured I would see how this works. So I made an account and then uploaded the mp3s from our Preserve This Podcast podcast. If you search for Preserve This Podcast on the Internet Archive, you’ll find our files there.

Another place that will host your audio files for free is Wikimedia Commons. They’re strict about having copyright ownership over any content you upload. By uploading to Wikimedia, you give open access to other people to share and remix and reuse whatever you post.

This isn’t a problem for us. We’re publishing our podcast under a Creative Commons CC-BY license. People are allowed to share and remix our show, as long as they give us attribution.

[MUSIC]

But what if you want it all? You want to stop paying for hosting, but you still want your podcast to be available on podcatchers?

This is a situation that the Preserve This Podcast team will face in 2020. We have funding to pay for a host until then – we decided to go with Simplecast because they have a nice nonprofit discount. But we needed to figure out what we’re going to do in 2020, when our money runs out.

SARAH: So I am Sarah Nguyen…

MOLLY: So I talked it over with Sarah Nguyen.

SARAH: I am the Project Coordinator for Preserve This Podcast.

MOLLY: And we decided that we should learn how to publish our OWN RSS feed. And self-host it. The only downside to self-hosting is that we won’t be able to get analytics about who’s downloading and listening to our show. But there are a lot of other benefits.

SARAH: Self-hosting is nice because you basically have full control of your RSS.

Then you can just put your RSS feed anywhere, and not have to worry if say Libsyn or any of the other platforms deprecate, or do an upgrade or they change their pricing model and you can’t afford it or anything like that.

MOLLY: To self-host our feed, we need to figure out how to do three things. First, we need to find somewhere on the web to host our audio MP3 files. Second, we need to create an RSS feed. And third, we need to find a place on the web to host that RSS feed.

We wanted to go as low cost as possible (as in no-cost).

So we decided to host our MP3 files on the Internet Archive, and host our RSS feed on our website, which we host for free on Github. We just pay about twenty bucks a year for our domain name.

Then Sarah got to work creating our own Preserve This Podcast RSS feed.

SARAH: RSS is built on this code called XML. And XML is similar to HTML where there are tags. Which identify what type of data you’re putting in it, whether it’s a title of your podcast, or your name, or the date field, a number field, or an MP3 file.

MOLLY: Sarah did figure it all out. She created the RSS XML fields, she filled in our podcast info, and she posted it on Github. Sarah has experience working with Github and XML – some of this might be a little inaccessible to non-coders. So we’re going to publish a self-hosting how-to guide for beginners on preservethispodcast.org in the coming months.

So now we’ve figured it out. We’ll be able to self-host our podcast when we close our Simplecast account in 2020.

There was one more thing to check on. We wanted to make sure that we’ll be able to export our RSS feed off of Simplecast’s platform and implement our self-hosting scheme in 2020. So Sarah checked in with Simplecast to explain our situation and learn how to do the transition.

Here’s what they said:

SARAH: There is a 301 redirect and you can do that once you close your podcast and it will redirect to whatever RSS you want.

MOLLY: A 301 redirect. We’d never heard of it.

SARAH: Uhh, what is a 301 redirect? I know 404 31:54 error page, but I don’t know 301 (laughter).

MOLLY: So we looked it up. And it turns out that this is something EVERY podcaster should know about. A 301 redirect will let you switch RSS feeds. It’ll take all your old listeners and subscribers with you to your new RSS feed.

Not all RSS hosting platforms provide a 301 redirect.

Here’s what Else from Libsyn has to say about that:

ELSIE: We really want to advise you to make sure that whoever you go with has a 301 redirect. It doesn’t matter if it’s us or anybody else. That is a key question that you need to ask before you host with anybody because I have seen many many heartbroken podcasters out there who have lost almost everything because their podcast host doesn’t know how to do that.

MOLLY: We’re glad we asked. Because in January 2020, we’ll be clicking the little button on our Simplecast dashboard that says “redirect”.

From that point on, we will be hosting our own podcast. And we will have no idea how many people are listening to it.

But you know what – that’s fine. As long as we stand a chance of being able to access and share our podcast in the future, I’m good.

The future is uncertain. Anything could happen. A solar flare could wipe out all our harddrives. We could be hit by a huge earthquake. Or nuclear war.

Archiving is about having some faith. Faith that civilization isn’t on the verge of collapsing. That people will care about this stuff in the future. Faith that in the years to come, someone will be there, listening.

JASON: The more history, the more saving, we will benefit as a race by having as much of this talking and music as possible.

Like 99% of archiving is going dah nah nah nah nah so that in 1000 years someone will do duh duh. And you have no idea if they’re going to be there at the other end.

[MUSIC]

Kaytlin: If I were explaining it to an alien I would say that it’s the recorded thoughts, musings, anecdotes, theater, entertainment that’s recorded by one person and then available to lots of people through the world wide web.

ALICE: Stories that will make you laugh, stories that will touch your heart, and stories that will make you angry.

AMANDA: God I love this show so much and I love audio drama.

DAN: Aalright, that’s me. Uh, tell the aliens. Weissman out.

JASON: My biggest hope is that the Preserve This Podcast project will cause people who have thought way too much about the now to think a little bit about the later, enough for them to make a few simple choices to increase the longevity of their work from one year to twenty. That’s about all we can really ask, of this project, so my hope is that what you’ll do.

[OUTRO MUSIC]

If YOU would like to preserve your podcast for future listeners – which you OBVIOUSLY DO – visit our website at preservethispodcast.org. Subscribe to this podcast wherever you get your podcasts. (Assuming it’s still there.) And please take some time to rate and review our show.

Preserve This Podcast is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It’s produced by me, Molly Schwartz, at the Metropolitan New York Library Council. Mary Kidd and Dana Gerber-Margie are our resident archivists. Sarah Nguyen is our project coordinator. Allison Behringer is our story editor. Breakmaster Cylinder composed the theme music. Dalton Harts did the mixing and the mastering and the sweet song in the outro. Music in this episode by Breakmaster Cylinder and Blue Dot Sessions. Thanks for listening.