John Hauser

John Hauser is a digital media archivist, technologist, and community media preservation leader whose work has helped save an enormous part of the field's moving-image history. Based in Eureka, California and associated with Access Humboldt, John founded the Community Media Archive in partnership with the Internet Archive and Access Humboldt, creating a pathway for PEG access stations and community media centers to preserve, host, and share their programs online. His work solved a problem many stations could not solve alone: how to keep local video accessible after cable playback, tape libraries, and station websites changed or disappeared.

Through the Community Media Archive and related automated YouTube and Vimeo archiving projects, John helped preserve hundreds of thousands of videos and their metadata from access centers, government channels, schools, libraries, and community media organizations across the United States and Canada. He has also helped stations understand how to use the Internet Archive as a practical preservation tool, not just a digital storage site. In 2015, he received the ACM's Sue Miller Buske Leadership Award for work that connected technology, stewardship, and field memory. John's contribution belongs to the preservation backbone of community media: the people making sure local voices, public meetings, cultural programs, campaigns, and long-lost footage can still be found.