View Online: University of Georgia Media Archives Improves Access To Rare Nixon Interview Footage

From the U. of Georgia:

The University of Georgia Libraries is using new technology to improve access to more than 30 hours of rare videotaped interviews with former President Richard M. Nixon.
In conjunction with the former president’s birthday, Jan. 9, the libraries is announcing the completion of the project.
The videotapes had been largely unseen outside of the group that produced them in 1983. They were donated to the UGA Libraries by Jesse Raiford, president of Raiford Communications, nearly 15 years ago. Raiford said he selected the UGA Libraries as the recipient of the tapes because he wanted them to be housed at an educational institution that would make them accessible to the public
The interviews-with full transcription-have been made available online. The interviews are an oral history of the former president’s life, from his childhood to his decision to resign the presidency, said Ruta Abolins, director of the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection. Copies of the tapes are also available for viewing at the Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries.
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The interviews will be presented online using Oral History Metadata Synchronizer, a technology developed to enhance online access to oral history. It is an open source, Web-based system providing users word-level search capability and linking a search term to the corresponding moment in the recorded video interview.
The interviews are of “incalculable value from a scholarly/research point of view,” said Fred Guida, a former professor of mass communications at UGA who appraised the tapes as part of the donation process. “The Nixon/Gannon interviews are, in fact, priceless in terms of their scholarly/historical value,” he said.
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Taking place nearly a decade after Nixon’s resignation, the interviews were conducted in four groups of two- and three-day sessions spread over seven months. Each two-hour interview was organized around a specific topic, including Vietnam, China, the Soviet Union, the Middle East, the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation as president, U.S. domestic policies, U.S. presidents, foreign leaders and Nixon’s reflections on his political career.
A sense of trust exists between Nixon and Gannon, a friend and former employee, allowing Nixon to be more candid than he was in any other interview setting, said Guida. “It is precisely because Mr. Nixon trusted Mr. Gannon that the interviews are as revealing and substantive as they are. Perhaps more to the point, the interviews contain no evidence that Mr. Gannon gave Mr. Nixon any sort of preferential treatment; there are no evasions nor are there any ‘softball’ questions,” Guida said.
About two-thirds of the interview material can be considered rare to unique in terms of subject matter, said Gannon, who served in the White House as a special assistant to the president, and flew with Nixon to California aboard Air Force One following his resignation in 1974. Gannon spent the next four years organizing the researching and writing of the former president’s memoirs, “RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, 1978.”

The video interviews are available direct from the University of Georgia (where you can utilize the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer) or on the Brown Media Archive YouTube Channel
See Also: Learn More About the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (a Project From the Nunn Center For Oral History, U. of Kentucky Libraries)

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Awards, Interviews, Libraries, News, Patrons and Users, Profiles, Video Recordings