3 Decades Of History Online at IOP Site

Harvard’s Institute of Politics (IOP) brought heads of state and Nobel prize-winners one step closer to undergrads earlier this week when it launched an expanded online video database containing footage from nearly three decades of on-campus speeches.

The new archive extends back to the opening of the institute’s event forum in 1978, and it includes almost 1,200 speeches and panels.

The archive starts with a video from an Oct. 21, 1978 appearance by John F. Kennedy Jr., who died in 1999 and who is now the forum’s namesake.

It also includes some of the most widely-publicized recent events at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, including footage from interviews with eight Democratic presidential candidates who visited Harvard in 2003 to film episodes of the MSNBC show “Hardball.”

The refined archive is now also searchable by topic, date, and speaker. It is accessible to the general public at www.iop.harvard.edu.

While the past seven years of forum events were already available online, the process of revamping the archive has taken the institute a whole year.

“It’s been a long and rather challenging process,” IOP Director Jeanne Shaheen said yesterday. “We had to go out to the Harvard archives and physically retrieve the tapes.”

But according to the vice president of the IOP’s Student Advisory Committee, Ari S. Ruben ’08, the launch of the archive was well worth the effort.

“I think the archive is an unbelievable resource for anyone who cares about the politics or the history of the past 25 years,” Ruben said. “It’s amazing hearing Bill Clinton give his stump speech in ’91. I’m a history concentrator and I love hearing the original sources.”

Shaheen, the former Democratic governor of New Hampshire, said that she hoped the live discussions recorded in the database would provide researchers and political junkies alike with not only content, but context.

“This is really history,” Shaheen said. “Those kinds of events can’t be reproduced anywhere, and the forum archive gives people the opportunity to see them as they happened in a way that’s so much more dramatic.”

Shaheen said that videos of all events happening at the forum will be immediately available, and she said the IOP will be releasing transcripts of select events online.

The existing database has already enjoyed considerable popularity. The database’s most popular clip last week was footage of a debate between MIT linguist Noam Chomsky and Harvard’s Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz, who verbally sparred at a Nov. 29 event entitled “Israel & Palestine After Disengagement: Where Do We Go From Here?” The clip was viewed 379 times.

The Dec. 6, 2005 panel entitled “Why Is Paris Burning?” scored a distant second, with 157 hits, according to IOP spokesman Esten Perez.

Statistics on downloads for the new archive have not yet been compiled, Perez said.

The IOP celebrated the archive’s launch with an event in the forum at which attendees picked their favorite clips to be played on the big screen. The first dean of the Kennedy School, Graham T. Allison Jr. ’62, kicked off the festivities with video footage of a speech by Senator Edward M. Kennedy ’54-’56 at the Kennedy School’s 1978 dedication.

Still, in order for the new database to be widely utilized, the IOP will need to advertise the archive’s existence, Ruben said.

“In order for it to affect the average Harvard student, we have a responsibility to make sure people know about it,” Ruben said.

—Staff writer Laurence H. M. Holland can be reached at lholland@fas.harvard.edu.