OU owns the world's largest political commercial archive in the world, and it is continuing to grow both technologically and in size.

Lisa Henry, archivist and collections curator of the Julian P. Kanter Political Commercial Archive, said the archive's administrators are looking to put part of it online, but that it will take time and require funding through grants. She said she is going to start working on getting grants as soon as the Nov. 8 election is over.

The archive has about 160,000 advertisements in total, but only 120,000 of them have been organized into a searchable catalog with descriptions and are available for research. When OU purchased the archive from Julian Kanter in 1985, it had only 25,000 advertisements.

"I do want to get a representation of everything that we've got ... some from every campaign, some from every decade, from every state, so that we really represent the breadth and the depth that we have," Henry said.

The collection has audio and video ads, including radio ads going back to the 1930's and moving picture ads going back to the 1950's.

Henry said the archive has so many ads that putting them all online would be too hard to maintain. She does want a sampling of ads to be available online, however, and hopes to have this accomplished before the next presidential election in 2020.

“We still sort of have the broadest availability of ads because we collect from presidential all the way down to local (advertisements),” Henry said.

Henry said the ads on film come in 14 formats, including beta, three-quarter-inch pneumatic and reel-to-reel, among others. She said the archive was digitized in 1999 but needs to be updated to today’s standards.

The collection is currently stored in temperature-controlled rooms with box after box stacked on shelf after shelf filled with films in various formats; some of the tapes are too big to fit into boxes, so they sit on their own shelf rack instead.

She said all of the commercials in the archive are also stored on a hard drive on site and a backup hard drive in Oklahoma City.

Many of the advertisements the archive currently receives are through donations. The archive is involved with the American Association of Political Consultants, and when political consultants retire, they send their old campaign commercials to the archive, she said.

Michael Carrier, the director of communications and outreach for the archive, said he left retirement to take a job there and it is a great resource for any student of politics or history.

"Anybody that comes to this archive and uses it, and anybody can, but anybody who comes here better understands what America was going through when they look at these commercials," Carrier said.

Henry said the archive has been involved in several documentary series, including "The Contenders - 16 for '16" on PBS, "13TH" on Netflix, and others.

“You just never know how the archive will be used,” Henry said.

Henry said the archive works like a library; it's free, and they have a viewing room for people to watch commercials on site.

Patrick Meirick, an associate professor of communication and the director of OU’s Political Communication Center, said he encourages his students to utilize the archive and that his graduate students are using it this semester for an experiment with political advertising.

“For me, it’s a great resource for getting and finding ads from our history,” Meirick said. “There’s really no better resource for that.”

Henry said the archive is like a time capsule because it shows how different things like fashion, cars and speech were at different times in history. She said seeing the images completes the picture when you know the history of what the country was going through at the time of a particular commercial.

“I call it ‘American politics in 30 seconds,’” Carrier said.