For University Archivist Hope Dunbar, one recording in the UB-WBFO Radio Archive keeps pulling her back.

It's April 1973. Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress and the first to run for a major party presidential nomination, is at UB’s Clark Hall gym, speaking on the effects of the Nixon administration on the African American community.

“Hearing her speak is so moving,” Dunbar says. “I am in awe of the time period she was speaking in, and how poised she was saying things that were deeply controversial. If you read a transcript of it, you wouldn’t get it. You wouldn’t get her inflection, her intonation. How her voice moves makes a difference. It’s almost like poetry — reading a poem and hearing a poem are two very different things.”

The availability of that recording, previously inaccessible to the public, is about to change. The UB-WBFO Radio Archive, which includes more than 2,000 hours of audio from UB’s public radio station spanning from 1959-1999, along with thousands of pages of station records, photographs, program guides and artifacts, enters its final phase of processing and sorting. It will be available online – free –  to researchers and listeners worldwide in 2027, hosted on the UB Libraries’ digital collections and accessible through a partnership with the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.

This massive and newly organized archival collection is a UB triumph. WBFO helped set the standard for how National Public Radio and its affiliates would approach news coverage.

Among the recordings: student reporters in gas masks broadcasting live from the 1970 campus protests, and original audio from the Jefferson Avenue Satellite Station, where WBFO staff trained East Side residents to write, produce and broadcast their own programming. It’s all there, vintage proof WBFO pioneered the glory days of NPR.

The list of historical events and speakers reads like a who's who for history and culture enthusiasts: Richard Nixon, Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Angela Davis, Leonard Cohen, Carl Sagan, Jane Fonda, Cesar Chavez, and Muhammad Ali, as well as dozens of others who passed through WBFO's orbit across five decades.

At the same time, the massive archive chronicles the brilliant, creative, eclectic, sometimes eccentric, sometimes visionary cast of characters who shaped WBFO’s history. From Wilson Greatbatch, engineering professor and inventor of the implantable cardiac pacemaker, who supported the students that built the station, to general manager Bill Siemering, who wrote NPR’s founding mission statement, to station alumni like Terry Gross, Mike Waters and Ira Flatow.

“WBFO was this huge collection of very talented, very eccentric people,” Gross said in a 1992 recording now held in the archive. “The studios were just always kind of boiling over with ideas and eccentricity, and it was really wonderful.”

And it’s all there, Dunbar says with a smile, preserved, catalogued and soon to be a few clicks away for all.

When Dunbar arrived as university archivist four years ago, the collection that held all of this history was, in her words, “enormous, important and largely stuck.” Thousands of magnetic reels were slowly degrading, the manuscript collection was unprocessed, and the station guides had never been digitized.

“It was immediately apparent that this was one of those rare, hidden gems in our holdings,” she says. “The kind of thing that needed a lot of effort and attention, but would be completely worth tackling.”

In 2017, Dunbar's predecessor Amy Vilz began digitizing the audio as part of a preservation initiative. That work continued until this past spring, when the last magnetic reel was converted to digital media: more than 2,000 hours of audio, rescued before it was lost for good.

In fall 2024, the UB Libraries funded a dedicated four-year project archivist position. Ken Axford has spent the past two years making sense of what’s there. Among his personal favorites is “The Buffalo Social History Project” from the 1970s, which includes “remarkable first-person narratives of immigrants on their experiences coming to Buffalo.” Then there was “Stonewall Nation,” WBFO’s groundbreaking program chronicling the lives of Buffalo’s gay community at a time established media wouldn’t touch the subject.

“I think WBFO shaped how the news, not just protests, was covered by public radio,” Axford says. “This was the democratic approach of treating all viewpoints with respect, not just relying on expert testimony.”

The archival manuscript collection is equally remarkable. UB archivist emerita Shonnie Finnegan, who first established University Archives’ relationship with WBFO in the 1970s, preserved a tear gas canister from the student protests. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at Kleinhans Music Hall in November 1967, months before his assassination, and the event program he signed for a UB student who drove him to the airport is in the collection.

“What makes the Archives so significant – especially when you can hear something, or feel something, or touch something – is that it makes history feel real,” Dunbar says. “It brings it down to a personal level. You hand a piece of paper to a student, and it makes history tangible in a way that reading it on a screen doesn’t.

“I think it’s inspiring.”

By 2027, the full audio collection will be discoverable through the American Archive of Public Broadcasting’s national platform, with the vast majority of the audio available for free public streaming, hosted at UB. A major public exhibition is planned for 2028.

“This is a collection built by the university and the community that surrounded it, and it will be freely available to both,” Dunbar says.

That access, she believes, is where the real work begins.

“History doesn’t stay still. These voices shaped public radio, shaped this community, and shaped how we talk to each other. What they’ll shape next is up to whoever finds them.”