The Kitchen Sisters

The Kitchen Sisters hit the links at the legendary Bing Crosby Pro Am at Pebble Beach.

Meet Itumeleng “Itu” Banda — a young, South African activist, award-winning radio host, and undeniable role model. A boundary-breaker and a storyteller. We met Itu at the 2019 International Congress of Youth Voices in Puerto Rico and recorded her stories. Motivated by a deep sense of responsibility for her community, and by personal experience with gun violence, Itu is committed to forging a futur...

The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted routines in every corner of the globe. Photographers have been quick to document how the world looks different: public squares, streets, and airport terminals devoid of people. But one composer wants to capture what that shift sounds like. Pete Stollery is an electro-acoustic composer living in Scotland and he sees this as a rare moment to listen to the noises the w...

#KeeperoftheDay – Latino Public Radio Consortium, an affiliate of the Library of Congress Radio Preservation Task Force. Here is a clip with astronaut Jose Hernandez from the Historias de Si Se Puede series: “sixty-second radio stories about immigrants and second generation Latinos, who through persistent struggle have found success in music, the professions, politics, community involvement, and a...

#KeeperoftheDay – Pacifica Radio Archives an affiliate of the Library of Congress Radio Preservation Task Force. “Chronicling the political, cultural and artistic movements of the second half of the 20th century.” Here’s a gem from the archive. A 1956 interview with Rosa Parks. https://www.pacificaradioarchives.org/recording/bb0566 Episode Title: Commentary of a Black Southern busrider / Rosa Park...

Josh Shepperd, Director of the Radio Preservation Task Force at the Library of Congress called The Keeper Hotline to tell us about this incredible undertaking. "Radio history is pretty endangered and it turns out to be one of the largest and unexplored and unpreserved archives in the United States..." Learn more: https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-recording-preservation-plan/about-this-program/...

Earlier this week, the San Francisco Public Works’s Bureau of Urban Forestry honored poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti with their annual signature tree. Lawrence, who turns 100 on March 24, is being feted all over town. We were delighted to be there for the tree-planting ceremony and to sprinkle some fresh soil (with a gold-plated shovel) onto the luscious olive tree’s root. The tree is just across the s...

A call from The Keepers Hotline. "Hi guys, my name is Steve Gainer. I am a cinematographer and curator of the American Society of Cinematographers Camera Museum in Los Angeles. Our collection is probably the most complete camera collection in the United States having to do with cinematographers. We don't just collect cameras because they're old and rare. We collect them because they have something...

Listener RJ Ramey called The Keepers Hotline to tell us about Monroe Work (1866-1945), who was hired by Book Washington as Director of Research and Records at Tuskegee Institute and worked to document every known lynching in the United States. Ramey created a website, monroeworktoday.org, to share Work's story.

#KeeperoftheDay - Le Musée de f.p.c. "We just started collecting slowly, not intentionally and we wake up 30 years later and we have this beautiful collection…” Listen to Beverly McKenna, who co-founded McKenna Museums with her husband Dr. Dwight McKenna, talk about Le Musée de f.p.c., the historic house museum honoring the legacy of New Orleans' free people of color. https://www.lemuseedefpc.com/

#KeeperoftheDay for Valentine's Day - The Kay Johnson Public Library in Valentine, Texas. Listen to this story produced by Andrea Gutierrez for the Transom Traveling Workshop in Marfa, Texas about Valentine librarian Lety Navarrete. "I’m a writer and former educator turned radio producer in Los Angeles. In summer 2018, I headed to Marfa, TX for the weeklong Transom Traveling Workshop, where radio...

#KeeperoftheDay - Mrs. Conti’s Florist Shop Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero talks about his childhood library in North Beverly, Massachusetts, located in the neighborhood florist shop. Do you have an idea for Keeper of the Day? Call our Keeper Hotline: 415-496-9049, or send us a note on Twitter or Instagram: @kitchensisters or on our website: http://www.kitchensisters.org/keepers/

#KeeperoftheDay - Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives at Oregon State University Tiah Edmunson-Morton called The Keeper Hotline to tell us about the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives, the first of its kind in the nation. She collects records of hops and brewing in the Northwest, highlights the experiences of women working in brewing, and has done 108 oral histories to date of people working in hops an...

"My favorite person, my hero, is a clerk in the State Department named Stephen Pleasonton. Who, the night before the British burned the town and the Capitol in the War of 1812, realized that the charters were at risk. He rolled them up, stuffed them into linen sacks, commandeered a wagon on the street and took them into the hills of Virginia. The only reason that the Constitution, the Declaration...

"FDR I’m convinced was a closet archivist himself. He called the Archives his baby. He designed a box to house his papers which is the prototype of the boxes we use now at the National Archives. From the very beginning the intent was that the American people needed to be able to access the records in order to hold the government accountable for its actions. And that’s what 'keeping' means.” Listen...

DJ Spooky aka Paul D. Miller aka That Subliminal Kid is a composer, a multimedia artist, a writer, a keeper, an “exchanger” who takes on big environmental and social issues in his work. We are huge fans of his music and his way of thinking. He came by our studio this week to talk about his new multimedia concert experience, Quantopia: The Evolution of the Internet, an homage to the 50th anniversar...

We talked with Valérie Sainte-Agathe, Artistic Director of the San Francisco Girls Chorus about the group’s upcoming performance of DJ Spooky’s Quantopia: The Evolution of the Internet, a multimedia hip hop concert experience about the history and exponential growth of the Internet. Commissioned by the Internet Archive. Catch the world premiere at YBCA Friday, January 25 in San Francisco. Get tick...

We interviewed writer Eliza McGraw for The Keepers podcast episode, the Pack Horse Librarians of Eastern Kentucky. She told us about other keepers in her life, including her Uncle Bill who "compulsively does dairy histories.” He and Eliza’s mother-in-law opened a dairy museum in Maryland which they call the MOOseum. Take a listen.

Zora Neale Hurston January 7, 1891 - January 28, 1960 Keeper of Culture, Zora Neale Hurston, was an anthropologist and the author four novels, including Their Eyes were Watching God (1937) and more than 50 published short stories, plays and essays. In 1939 during the depths of the Depression, she the went to work for the Florida Writers Project and worked with folklorist Stetson Kennedy and others...

“Every story matters. The challenge is getting that story to the historical record. Simply putting it into the archive is maybe not enough.” -Doug Boyd, Director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries. Listen to this story about the power of oral history to make connections across continents and across history.

#KeeperoftheDay No. 36 "Hi Kitchen Sisters. My name is Lindsay Smith Zrull and I'm a curator of astronomical photographs here at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. We have over 500,000 glass plate photographs of the night sky that were taken between 1885 and 1992...But the thing that's the most amazing at least in my opinion is that during the late 1800s and early 1900s we had a team...

While recording stories for The Keepers we had the honor and pleasure of interviewing French director Agnès Varda. We sought her out for our story Archive Fever: Henri Langlois and The Cinémathèque Française because she knew Langlois back in the day. We went to her home/production office in Paris—the apartment was filled with the scent of red peppers roasting. A bouquet of roses Martin Scorcese ha...

Aaron Swartz Day co-founder Lisa Rein talks about about her work with the annual hackathon. Founded in 2013 after the death of activist and programming wunderkind Aaron Swartz, the event draws attention to Aaron’s story in hopes of protecting others from similar circumstances and offers a yearly showcase of the many projects initiated by Aaron as well as new projects inspired directly by him and h...

#KeeperoftheDay No. 18: Radio Haiti Archive. Laura Wagner from the Radio Haiti Archive at Duke University called The Keeper Hotline to tell us about this "trilingual digital archive of Haiti's first independent radio station, Radio Haiti Inter." The project is "salvaging and preserving the original tape—more than 5300 programs—and digitizing the entire archive and describing every recording in Eng...

#KeeperoftheDay No. 15: Our Children’s Trust / #youthvgov Beatrice Bowles called The Keeper Hotline to nominate Our Children’s Trust for Keeper of the Day. “I am so impressed with the young people who have brought a case to court—to the Supreme Court—defending their right to stand up for the environment.” Learn more about these keepers of the environment at http://ourchildrenstrust.org