The internet has aged to the point where it is easy to fall into a rabbit hole, reminiscing about websites from decades past.
The site that fuels those scrolling endeavors is the Internet Archive — a nonprofit that hosts a digital library of internet sites and other artifacts in digital form. The project began in 1996 to archive the web.
Today, it contains one trillion web pages through its “Wayback Machine,” as well as 56 million books and texts. It also works with approximately 1,400 libraries through its Archive-It program to identify and preserve important digital history.
Kay Savetz (K6KJN) freely admits to having been an Internet Archive power user. Savetz used not just the archive.org website, but also its command line interface to upload many documents.
A licensed amateur radio operator since 1989, Savetz’s own interviews with Atari 8-bit computer pioneers are among those early uploads. So when the Amateur Radio Digital Communications foundation provided a significant grant to the Internet Archive to form a collection of the history of amateur radio and adjacent endeavors, the archive sought a lead curator. Savetz was a natural fit.
The project was funded in 2022 and titled the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications. Today, DLARC has approximately 225,000 items, spanning magazines, newsletters and call books.
In computing terms, that’s about 26 terabytes of storage space, Savetz told us.
Savetz took us inside DLARC’s impressive array of content, and we’ve added links to the featured offerings throughout our story.
All you need is time.
Click this link to peruse the collection — and you’ll probably all of a sudden wonder where an hour of your day went. From QSL cards to logbooks to newsletters to even lectures on DX and related topics.
DLARC is a haven for radio amateurs, but also shortwave enthusiasts, long-distance radio reception clubs, early communication pioneers and more recently, college and community radio.
Full runs of 73 Magazine are available, as well as early public-domain QST issues. There are also Aviation and Wireless magazines that date back to the early 1900s.
“We have Radio News from the early part of the 1900s, from back in the day when the hot new things were airplanes and radios,” Savetz said.
The items go beyond paper, as Savetz has helped digitize 35mm slides, reel-to-reel tapes, 16mm film, U-matic, Beta and various floppy disk formats.
One of the approximately 150 searchable callbooks that are part of the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications.
And the beauty of a digital collection is that, all of a sudden, the best features of the internet are available to peruse through documents that were produced a century ago.
Place a call sign into the text search field on the Internet Archive, Savetz suggested, and every instance of those calls in DLARC will appear.
Audio and video recordings, such as DLARC’s extensive collection of ham radio conference recordings, are automatically transcribed so they become full-text searchable.
Savetz keeps an active “want list” of missing materials. You can view it here. But a radio club, no matter the size, is suitable for DLARC if it has published newsletters.
The search for lost material has been a central theme of the rabbit holes Savetz has experienced. In many cases, a club might grant permission to access documents from the past, but the physical copies remain elusive or are in such poor condition they barely survive the trip to the scanner.
A QSL card for the University of Pennsylvania Amateur Radio Club station W3ABT circa 1935, digitized as part of the Digital Library of Amateur Radio Communications.
Some documents simply weren’t meant to be saved. “They were meant to be used once and tossed — and they were printed on one-ply toilet paper,” Savetz said of some early newsletters.
But there are just as many success stories. The Ohio/Penn DX Bulletin, for instance, was successfully recovered thanks to publisher Tedd Mirgliotta (KB8NW).
The first approximately 230 issues had never been on the internet. Mirgliotta was able to successfully boot up a computer in his attic that was still running a weather station on a vintage operating system to retrieve the files and send them to Savetz.
College and community collections
For Jennifer Waits, preserving the history of college radio has always been a top-flight passion. Waits has toured hundreds of universities across the U.S., not only to get a glimpse of campus radio operations but also to instill the importance of archiving what might otherwise be left behind.
Waits joined Savetz two years ago to lead DLARC’s college and community radio sub-collections.
College radio, Waits observed, has its roots in the early amateur radio clubs of the 1920s. “That’s part of the origin story,” Waits explained, “college radio didn’t just suddenly appear in the ’80s.”
DLARC has since collaborated with numerous radio stations and college and university archives for the project. Such collections include Haverford College Radio Club and Stations, Smith College Radio Club and Stations and WYBC Yale Broadcasting Company.
Whether it is carrier-current era publications from the ‘40s and ‘50s, or forgotten websites from MySpace or Tumblr — which could now go back two decades — Waits said they are of equal importance, and she uses the chance as an opportunity to remind outlets that even material of today should be archived.
The Intercollegiate Broadcasting System green-lighted Waits permission to digitize its history, as its own central archive had been lost over the years due to fires or misplacement.
DLARC recently received a large collection of digitized paper radio station playlists representing college, community, high school and public stations in the 1980s, which it released on this past World College Radio Day.
A representative of the defunct Cleveland College Radio Coalition also recently donated a collection of digitized copies of playlists, program guides and more.
AI-based transcription tools, meanwhile, have made it easier to read transcripts from past shows, such as a Ramones’ interview on WUSB(FM) from 1981.
Community radio stations are being represented in DLARC also. There are surveys, scheduling grids, playlists and other promotional materials that are digitized from the likes of WFMU(FM), WAIF(FM), KPFK(FM) and others, and Waits hopes to grow the collection further.
The collection is also interested in adding more items for collegiate amateur radio stations.
The preservation also goes for groups dealing with radio propagation that are not necessarily involved in amateur radio. Bob Cooper, for instance, was a pioneer in VHF DXing and satellite television.
Radio World wrote about him in a recent E-Skip propagation primer. DLARC recently rescued some seven pallets of material from a warehouse belonging to Cooper, who passed away in 2022.
“We got basically his entire life, every magazine, every video he made,” Savetz said. “It was seven pallets of stuff and it was just like, ‘Okay, go in there, take what you want, decide what is worthy of digitizing and preserving online.’”
Perhaps we need to propose a new mathematical formula — as seven pallets has resulted in 3.3 TB worth of material from Cooper.
No matter how large, ultimately, the goal is to make these records accessible for future generations, Savetz said. ARDC specifically wanted its grant to go to ensure the materials are hosted forever without the burden of ongoing costs.
“There’s a thousand research papers and dissertations buried in here,” Savetz said. “Mostly, use the library. Know it exists. It’s there for you.”
Savetz encourages radio amateurs or hobbyists to either write to DLARC directly or upload their material to the archives. For college radio items, Waits invites those contributors to contact her.
Together, it will fuel many future adventures down a rabbit hole.
“If it’s related to amateur radio or digital communications, send it right to me or you can upload it yourself,” Savetz said. “I don’t care how it gets done as long as the information gets in the archive.”