Citizen Archivists: The Role of Retrontario in Sharing Television History

This thesis studies the online archive Retrontario, run by Ed Conroy from his home. Retrontario focuses on finding and sharing Ontario’s local television content from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, that is inaccessible elsewhere.

While Retrontario collects multiple forms of media, the largest are VHS tapes. These VHS tapes are mostly of content that was recorded from television and donated to Retrontario by the public. They are digitized by Conroy and posted online.

Retrontario is not concerned with copyright in the manner government archives are. In addition, due to a lack of space, Retrontario is less focused on long-term preservation and storage than government archives are. Instead, Retrontario uses its freedoms within copyright to share a large quantity of material that would otherwise have not been seen.

Conroy refers to this style of archiving as ‘Citizen Archivists’. The research question of this thesis is: What are the challenges and opportunities of Retrontario, and other Citizen Archivists in preserving and sharing local media history? This thesis explores the role Retrontario, and Citizen Archivists play within collections, and argues that despite Retrontario’s limitations, its work as an access-based platform is important television archiving.