ATHA Rocket Grant Fuels WJZ-TV Searches

Map of the Anacostia Trails Heritage Area (ATHA)

Thanks to an Anacostia Trails Heritage Area (ATHA) Rocket Grant, we have enhanced the accessibility of our WJZ-TV collection through the creation of speech-to-text transcripts.

MARMIA has digitized nearly 700 videos from our WJZ-TV Collection and all of them are available on the Internet Archive. While we upload all of our digitized material to the Internet Archive for safekeeping and access, we aim to make our collections even more accessible through the Aviary platform. Aviary allows our videos to be more discoverable through searchable, timestamped transcripts, which also act as closed captions. With the support of the ATHA Rocket Grant, we integrated Trint into our Aviary workflow. Trint is an online transcription and editing platform that turns audio and video into searchable, editable, and shareable content. We created transcripts for all of our digitized WJZ-TV videos and they are now searchable through our Aviary page!

We searched for ATHA’s “Goddard” Space Flight Center and found four hits in this 1977 Evening Magazine episode.

In addition to creating transcripts for the WJZ-TV content we already had, we researched key dates and events in local newspapers and digitized 18 more WJZ-TV tapes which included Eyewitness News and Evening Magazine. At the end of this three-month project, we have located 93 ATHA-related clips. We hope that the archival footage we found can be reused to tell new stories and encourage people to visit and learn more about the ATHA.

Here are some of our favorite ATHA clips:

Two 1977 “Evening Magazine”stories at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Visitor Center

“Evening Magazine” 1987 story on Mrs. Preston’s First Grade Class from Laurel, Maryland who made an award-winning short animation, “When Tyrannosaurus Rex Speaks Everyone Listens”.