Talk:University of Maryland

CTW archives sources
I've been adding a lot of episode information based on documents that I've found at the CTW archives at the University of Maryland. Here are some examples of the documents that I've been using, along with information on how to find them if you visit the archives.

The archives are about 400 boxes worth of files donated by Sesame Workshop to the National Public Broadcasting Archives at the University of Maryland. Most of the boxes have been indexed by the librarians, although there are still some unindexed boxes. (You can see the index in pdf form here.) The archives are open to the public, so if you can get to College Park, Maryland, you can look through this stuff too. Check out National Public Broadcasting Archives website for more information.

The files include letters, memos, contracts, promotional materials, press releases, research documents, newspaper clippings and newsletters. It's a big jumble, and it takes some time to go through everything. I've made five trips to the archives so far, and brought some of my wiki friends with me. There's still lots to look through.

A lot of the material isn't interesting or relevant to the wiki, but as we've been going through it, we've found some real treasures. That information is gradually finding its way onto the wiki; we've added information about songs, merchandise, actors and characters based on what we've found there.

I've also found some good info on the episodes, and that's what I'll be showing here. The information that I've found is spotty and incomplete -- I haven't found a big book of scripts or anything. So I'm posting what I can find, and we'll fill in more gaps as we go.

I wish that I could scan everything that we've found at the archives and post it to the wiki, but it's literally thousands of pages of photocopies, so it's not feasible. The best we can do is show where to find the information in the archives. I recommend a visit for any Muppet Wiki contributor; it's an incredible resource.

Here's a summary of the sources that I'm using. I'll post more sources as I find them. -- Danny (talk ) 14:33, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

First Season Show Content
There's a file called "First Season Show Content", which lists all of the inserts used in the first season, along with the episode numbers that they appeared in. This is from the files of Dave Connell, the show's first executive producer, and it's in Box 36, folder 29. The document is 70 pages long, and I've used it to make the episode guides from episode 0001 through episode 0130. Unfortunately, I haven't found documents like this for any other season yet.

Here's some sample pages:

Script Highlights
This is the main treasure trove of episode information. CTW wrote summaries for individual episodes, and sent them to educators and parents who wanted to plan educational activities to tie in with each day's Sesame episode. These were called "Program Packages" for a while, and then "Script Highlights". The archives have them in Box 52, folders 8-18.

These folders include episode summaries for about 900 episodes -- most of Season 3, the last couple weeks of Season 4, all of Season 6, most of Season 7, all of Season 8, most of Season 9, about two-thirds of Season 10, all of Season 11, and about 30 episodes from Season 12. I've been steadily working through these, posting the information that I can find.

The highlights are written in different formats as they go on. Some episodes get a whole page. Some have a week's episodes over two pages, or a week's episodes over four pages. The later ones have two episodes per page.

These summaries were written for educators, and they focus on the educational goals of the episode. Therefore, they don't always have the information that we, as fans, would want to know. They don't list every segment. Sometimes they describe a Street story, and sometimes they don't. Usually, the summary doesn't say whether a particular piece is a cartoon, a film, a song, a Muppet segment or a Street segment.

Here's a typical example, from the summary for Episode 0932: "Humpty Dumpty's body is put together after a crash. (Part/Whole Relationship)"

Now, I recognize that as a Sesame Street News Flash segment, but the summary itself doesn't mention the News Flash, or Kermit, or even that it's a Muppet segment at all.

So there's a lot of fantastic information that I can find in these summaries, but they're incomplete, and it takes some interpretation to figure out which segments they're talking about.

Here's some samples. I've noted the pages that you can compare to the full episode guide page that we have, so you can see how the summary matches up with the actual episode.

Research studies
I've also been able to find scattered episode information in the research files. CTW tested their material very rigorously, and some of the reports mention which segments come from which episodes.

"The Responses of Children in Six Small Viewing Groups to Sesame Street Shows 261-274" is a study by Barbara Frengel Reeves, dated July 20, 1971. The study tested how well children paid attention to 14 episodes from the last few weeks of Season 2. The report is 32 pages, and it's in Box 37, folder 7.

Some of the tables in the report list segments, with the episode number that the segment appeared in. I've added this information to episode 0261 through episode 0274, as far as I could recognize what segment the report refers to. Again, the descriptions are a little cryptic, so they require some interpretation.