The Rewind

When Bass Pro Shops won Scene Savers’ first-ever $10,000 Grant Giveaway at the 2025 AMIA conference, the award created an opportunity to preserve a remarkable cross-section of American outdoor media history.

Working with archivist Jacqueline Bonsee, Scene Savers received film elements dating back to the 1940s and 1950s from the Fred Bear Archery Collection, along with videotapes containing Bass Pro Shops, Ranger Boats, Bill Dance, and Roland Martin commercials. Fred Bear is widely regarded as a pioneering figure in modern bowhunting — an innovator, filmmaker, and founder of Bear Archery whose legacy remains deeply influential in sporting culture and conservation history.

At Scene Savers, we embrace AI the same way we approach every preservation challenge: with rigor, care, and a constant focus on quality, data integrity, and long-term usability.

A large-scale client came to us with a persistent problem — their project required transcription and closed captioning for broadcast materials featuring significant musical segments. For years, the singing had never been successfully transcribed. Singing presents a fundamentally different challenge than speech: pitch, rhythm, melody, and performance style can all confound traditional tools.

When a film canister labeled simply “Old Homecoming” arrived for preservation, no one expected to find a President inside.

The reels contained what they promised: old footage of Northern State University’s spirited Homecoming celebration, complete with marching bands threading through Aberdeen’s streets, floats swaying in the autumn wind, and a hard-fought football game. But found within this incredible local history was something that caught the eye — or perhaps we should say, someone.

For Morgan Geiringer, audiovisual preservation is both a practical responsibility and a deeply human one. Over the past 20 years working in archives and special collections, she has seen firsthand how quickly media can deteriorate and how easily access can be lost as formats become harder to play, transfer, and support.

Morgan came to the field through Library Science, but like many archivists, much of her expertise has been built through experience, collaboration, and continual learning. She is quick to note that A/V preservation depends on more than technical knowledge alone — fundraising and advocacy are essential skills. The work only moves forward when archivists can communicate why these materials matter.

She is especially proud of her long-running work to digitize the NBC5/KXAS Television News Collection — an extraordinary record of Texas broadcast history that has since been licensed for national and international productions. Scholars can finally hear the voices they study. Families can rediscover relatives and moments from long ago. For Morgan, seeing UNT credited in documentaries is proof that preservation work can keep history active in the present while also helping support its future.

Morgan’s dedication is a reminder of how much care, advocacy, and collaboration it takes to keep audiovisual history alive.