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WNYC Preservation

Andy Lanset, WNYC Archivist

Andy Lanset

Growing up in New Jersey, Archivist Andy Lanset was probably the only 8-year-old who spent all of his paper route money on records and wind-up phonographs at the flea market and then cataloged them all in a 3x5 card file. Since then, he has gone on to amass an archive of his own as well as to collect, organize, and preserve thousands of recordings, photographs, and station-related ephemera for the WNYC Archives. Since establishing the Archives in 2000, Andy has been working in-house with recordings in nearly every possible format. At the same time, he has been reaching out to former producers around the country for WNYC materials that have migrated over the station's long history.

After receiving a B.A. in Sociology from the State University of New York at Purchase, Andy began his public radio career in 1981 as the staff reporter for WBAI. By the mid-1980s, he was freelancing reports, features, and documentaries for NPR, CBC, BBC, Monitor Radio, and other public radio outlets. He produced several award-winning documentaries for NPR, including Scottsboro: A Civil Rights Milestone, which aired in 1991.

During the 1990s, Andy worked closely with David Isay and Henry Sapoznik on the Peabody award winning Yiddish Radio Project. He has also evaluated and preserved audio materials for NYU's Wagner Labor Archives, Columbia University, Cornell University, Union Theological Seminary, The Cleveland Public Library, The YIVO Institute, and other specialized and academic collections. Andy also has an MS and archives certificate from The Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Sciences. In October, 2009 he was awarded the Archivists’ Roundtable of Metropolitan New York Award for Archival Achievement for his work at WNYC. You can e-mail Andy at alanset@wnyc.org.