If you are interested in becoming a station partner or are an organization that hosts live lecture events we would be happy to follow up with you about becoming affiliated with the Forum Network. Visit our Become a Partner page for more information or email us at forumnetworkpartners@wgbh.org.

We are interested in all informative and educative lecture, panel, interview, interpretive, symposia, conference, and salon-style content on the Forum Network that meets our criteria. Our ability to record an event is based on the audio equipment at the event-venue, our videographer availability, and proximity to one of our station partner's area of operations.

We ask that you contact us at forumnetworkpartners@wgbh.org at least four weeks before the event, if possible. Please include your name and contact information, your organization’s name and location, along with as many details of your upcoming event(s) as possible, including location, dates, times, speakers, lecture topic and description. Our Forum Network staff will be happy to respond to your inquiry as soon as possible.

We are interested in all informative and educative lecture, panel, interview, interpretive, symposia, conference, and salon-style content on the Forum Network that meets our criteria. Our ability to accept recordings is based on a variety of factors, including production quality and the type of speaker and/or materials release forms used.

Please contact us at forumnetworkpartners@wgbh.org and be sure to include your name and contact information, your organization’s name and location, along with any details of your recorded event(s), including locations, dates, speakers, and lecture titles and descriptions. Our Forum Network staff will be happy to respond to your inquiry in a timely manner.

Because the Forum Network offers audio and video of entire lectures, our media files are often quite large. If you have a slow Internet connection, or if our website is experiencing a period of high traffic, the streaming media might take longer to load. Try opening a lecture and hitting the Pause button. Let the stream load for a few minutes, then hit the Play button. This should allow the lecture to play more smoothly.

The Forum Network is authorized by the speakers and our community partners to offer these lectures on demand after they occur. All lectures are offered as webcasts [streaming audio and video] but only those expressly authorized by the individual speakers are made available for download or podcasting. We are making every effort to offer as many lectures as possible in portable format, so we encourage you to check our growing list regularly. Video downloads are available in the iTunesU directory by searching on "Forum Network.”

To save an .mp3 file to your computer, click on the "Download MP3" link. The file will begin downloading, but it might not save to your hard drive unless you tell it to. The next time you play one of our MP3s, wait until it is completely loaded in the web browser [the scroll bar on the Quicktime player turns completely gray once the MP3 is fully loaded] and then click on the downward pointing arrow on the far righthand side of the player. This will offer you a dropdown list of options, including one called "Save as Source". If you choose this option, you will be able to name the file and determine where to save it. If you look in the folder where you saved, you will find a copy of the MP3 that you were listening to. From here you can put it onto an MP3 player or burn a CD or just listen to it on your computer without being connected to the Internet. Another way that you can do this is to choose "Save Page As" from your Internet browser's file menu.

Please report bugs or technical difficulties to forumnetworkbugs@wgbh.org. Our technical staff will be happy to help you get back to listening to our lectures as soon as possible.

Forum Network lectures are available through RSS feeds, which allow you to have updates from your favorite sites automatically delivered to your desktop or digital device. To use this service, you must register with a free RSS news reader or aggregator [entering "RSS readers" or "RSS aggregators" in a search engine will produce a list of available services.] Once registered, you will be informed of any new lectures added [depending on the feed you choose] to the Forum Network simply by adding the Forum Network's RSS feed to your customized RSS list.

These readings, along with other historic recordings on our website, come from the WGBH archives. As additional recordings become eligible for re-release on the Internet, we will add them to our collection as soon as possible.

The Forum Network licenses its digital lecture content for the purpose of webcasting it on the Forum Network. We are not permitted to distribute offline copies of this material. However, the Forum network Partner organizations that sponsor lecture events often offer video or cassette tapes for sale and may be able to help with your request. Forum Network partner organizations that sponsor Forum Network lectures are credited on the respective lecture page.

At this time we have a limited number transcripts available for download, free of charge, directly from the Forum Network site. These transcripts are available for lectures that have been captioned, as well. We will continue to caption more and more of our lectures, and add transcripts as they become available.

To find out if a lecture has a transcript for download simply go to the lecture page where you will see a transcript button. Click on the transcript button to instantly download a PDF transcript of the lecture to your desktop.

If a transcript is not available through the Forum Network, partner organizations that sponsor lecture events often offer transcripts, video or cassette tapes for sale and may be able to help with your request. Forum Network Partner organizations that sponsor Forum Network lectures are credited on the respective lecture page.

We do our very best to make our lectures available online as soon as possible after the actual event. Typically, it takes us two weeks to process and publish each lecture.

Currently, the Forum Network does not offer a calendar listing upcoming events in your area, though this is on our wishlist. In the meantime, we encourage you to consult the Event Calendar on the website of your local public station to see what's going on around town.

Our audiences are invited to sign up for our email newsletter, which is effectively our mailing list. Our newsletter will feature exciting lectures in our library, speakers in the headlines, and upcoming lectures of possible interest. You may also follow the Forum Network on Facebook and Twitter, or by subscribing to one of our RSS feeds for weekly podcasts and new lecture listings.

Unfortunately, we are not authorized to make this information public, and, in most cases, do not have this information. You may want to contact the organization that hosted a particular speaker to see if they can assist you. To go to an organization's website, please click the partner link or logo on the lecture page or on the Partners page.

Please note that we do feature Speaker Profiles on the Forum Network and intend to build out this area so speakers and audiences can interact through comments, threaded discussions, and other social networking features.

Please contact us forumnetworkpartners@wgbh.org and indicate in your email that you are already a featured speaker on the Forum Network. Our Forum Network staff will be happy to assist you. In the future, we hope to have speakers and partners curate their own profile pages.

Please contact us forumnetworkpartners@wgbh.org and indicate in your email that you would like to be a featured speaker on the Forum Network. Please include as many details as possible about yourself, your area of expertise, any past and/or upcoming lectures you would like to contribute to the Forum Network. Our Forum Network staff will be happy to respond to your inquiry as soon as possible.