The Extension Information Office (which later became Extension Communications) and the Agricultural Experiment Station Information office (which later became Agricultural Experiment Station Communications) were separate units until 1983, when they were combined into a single unit in the College of Agricultural Sciences known as Agricultural Communications. The name was changed in March of 1996 to Extension and Experiment Station Communications to reflect the move at OSU to make Extension a university-wide outreach activity. Extension Information provided support in the design, production, and distribution of educational materials, publications, news releases, feature stories, radio programs initially, but have added in more recent years: videotape, satellite delivery, web delivery.
William C. Smith worked in Extension Communications as a broadcast communications specialist from 1954 until his retirement in 1978. He filmed and produced many of the 1950s-1970s films in the collection.
Dave King, producer of many of the films in this collection from the 1980s, was Assistant Editor for Radio and Television from 1976 until 1987, when he became Experiment Station Electronic Media Coordinator for the office of Agricultural Communications.
The Extension and Experiment Station Moving Images include final productions and raw footage documenting the wide variety of Extension Service programs and Experiment Station research activities including agriculture, logging and forest products, land use planning, nutrition and food preservation, consumer education, fisheries and marine resources, energy conservation, and 4-H programs. The collection includes footage pertaining to ashfall from the Mount St. Helens eruptions of the early 1980s; direct marketing of farm products; balloon logging; noxious weeds; and the
Much of the footage from the 1960s and 1970s was shot for the
Moving images in the collection from the 1980s were primarily used for public service announcements and video news releases. These include three series produced by Dave King and other staff:
The materials from the 1990s include final productions on VHS videotape and DVD and videorecordings of Extension Service teleconferences and workshops,
Collection is open for research.
Most of the items in the collection are individually numbered; however, more recent additions are arranged by accession and not individually numbered.
Extension and Experiment Station Communications Moving Images (FV P 120), Oregon State University Archives, Corvallis, Oregon.
Preliminary container lists are available online for the collection:
This collection is not fully processed; this guide is preliminary.
We acknowledge that materials in SCARC collections and the language that describes them may be harmful. We are actively working to address our descriptive practices; for more information please see our
SCARC describes the contents of its collections using the language and terminology of the collections themselves. Since culturally acceptable terminology shifts over time, some of the terms that appear in these materials are currently outdated or offensive. For instance, "disabled" has now largely replaced the once widely-accepted term "handicapped." Nevertheless, these materials are part of disability histories in that they can provide valuable insight into the social construction of disability, the perception and treatment of disabled people, and the presence of disabled communities and cultures. Please be aware that some of the contents in this collection may be disturbing or activating; for example, the collection contains materials using sanist/ableist language such as the use of the r-word.
Materials were transferred from Extension and Experiment Station Communications and its predecessor offices in several accessions from the 1970s through 2007.
Additions to the collection are expected.
The OSU Archives collections also include the Extension and Experiment
Station Communications