Public Domain Spotlight: Popeye

Over the last few years we have seen many new characters enter the public domain including Winnie-the-Pooh in 2022, Mickey Mouse in 2024, and now, Popeye in 2025! The character emerged from a comic strip called Thimble Theater, which was started in 1919 and originally centered around the characters Ham Gravy and Olive Oyl. Popeye made his first appearance in the series as a minor player in early 1929, and as his popularity grew, he later became the central focus of the comic.

Let’s take a look at who Popeye was as a character in 1929:

January 17, 1929

In his very first appearance, Popeye shows off his thorny side by retorting Castor Oyl’s question with a sly remark about being a cowboy. The strip also shows him in a traditional all white sailor get-up that does not reflect his later appearance.


February 14, 1929

Popeye wears a black shirt for the first time, which is more in line with his iconic appearance.


February 18, 1929

Popeye throws his first ever punch. This time against Ham Gravy, one of the main characters of the strip at this point. The title, “That Sailor’s No Gentleman”, is indicative of Popeye’s rough and tough demeanor that would come to define the character.


June 11, 1929

After being shot repeatedly nearly a month earlier, in May 1929, Popeye reemerges full of bullet holes to knock down a foe. His displays of super strength do not originate from spinach, but possibly from rubbing the head of the Whiffle Hen (as seen on May 16, 1929).


June 15, 1929

Olive Oyl displays her first inclinations of romantic interest toward Popeye stating she would like to give him a kiss. The two do not become romantically involved in 1929, but the seeds were planted early.


June 27, 1929

This strip sees Popeye leave until August. However, his departure is not even the main appeal of the strip as it instead focuses on Olive Oyl’s purchase of new clothing. This focus and Popeye’s long absence, he is gone for all of July, thus implies that he was not meant to be a long lasting character, but only around temporarily.


August 5, 1929

Following over a month-long absence, Popeye returns to help Castor Oyl determine if Olive’s new boyfriend is only there for her money. His return indicates his overwhelming popularity with the public that was soon to transpire into his status as unchallenged main character of the strip. The title of this strip too foreshadows this shift being titled: Popeye’s The Man.


August 27, 1929

Olive Oyl displays her first show of affection to Popeye with a kiss. Though this was a mistake as she believed Popeye to be someone else. Despite this, it is yet another early indicator of their soon to be romance.


October 12, 1929

Popeye and Castor Oyl set off to locate Castor’s newly purchased brass mine. Their duo pairing indicates Popeye’s increased status and stature within the strip as Castor was the undeniable main character of the strip up to this point. Popeye’s appearance here again followed a brief absence from the strip dating back to September 30, 1929.


October 22, 1929

Popeye and Castor discover that where the brass mine ought to be is instead a farmer. Popeye implores Castor to allow the farmer to stay on the land, thus showing off his tender heart. Notably this strip takes place just two days before Black Thursday, the start of the Wall Street crash of 1929.


November 4, 1929

This strip shows off a bit more of Popeye’s peculiar dialect and his penchant for curving authority. In the strip he asserts that he is only going to jail because Castor has implored him to.

The title of the panel, “That Jailer’s No Postage Stamp”, also appears to be a humorous play on odd dialects installing postage stamp in lieu of “sap”. In 1920s slang, sap referred to a foolish or gullible person. The title’s swapping of the two terms is reflective of Popeye’s own tendency to swap out words with similar meaning as a postage stamp and sap are both sticky.


November 7, 1929

Another display of Popeye’s superhuman strength as he rips the bars off the jail cell.


Throughout 1929, Popeye not only showcased his superhuman strength and distinctive wardrobe but also his unique dialect and a characteristic phrase, “blow me down.” These foundational elements of his character, present from his very inception, have now entered the public domain. As we continue to engage with and reinterpret Popeye in modern contexts, there are some complexities. 

Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, explains the following in regards to character copyrights in a post from 2025:

“First, under US copyright law, anyone is free to use characters as they appeared in public domain works. If those characters recur in later works that are still under copyright, the rights only extend to the newly added material in those works, not the underlying material from the public domain works—that content remains freely available.

Second, with newer versions of characters, copyright only extends to their features that qualify for protection. It is not enough for the new material to be different. The features must be “original, creative expression,” meaning that they were independently created (as opposed to copied from somewhere else) and possess at least a modicum of creativity. Mere “ideas” such as generic character traits are not copyrightable. Nor are “merely trivial” or “minuscule” variations added to the original characters. In addition, using commonplace elements that have become standard or indispensable (copyright law calls these “scènes à faire”) is not infringement.”

Jenkins, Jennifer, and James Boyle. “Public Domain Day 2025.” Duke University School of Law, December 2024. https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2025/.


As beloved characters enter the public domain, modern creators can give them a new gloss, recontextualizing them for a new audience. One memorable example is a 2023 horror movie starring a much darker vision of Winnie the Pooh: “Blood and Honey.” We look forward to seeing what modern reinterpretations of Popeye arise, now that his fundamental character traits belong to everyone as part of the public domain.

Vanishing Culture: Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications

The following guest post from curator and amateur radio enthusiast Kay Savetz is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

A selection of cassette tapes from the “Ham Radio & More” radio show digitized by DLARC.

Amateur Radio has been a hobby for well over 100 years. For as long as there has been an understanding of electricity and radio waves, people have been experimenting with these technologies and advancing the state of the art. As a result, the world has moved from wired telegraphy to tube radios to telephones—fast forward a century—to GPS and high-speed digital communication devices that fit in your pocket.

Advances made by amateur radio experimenters have propelled the work of NASA, satellites, television, the internet, and every communications company in existence today. People fiddling with radios have pushed forward technological advances the world around, time and time again.

And yet, the people making these efforts, doing these feats, aren’t always the best at documenting and preserving their work for the future. That’s where Internet Archive comes in.

I’m the curator of the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications. DLARC is a project of the Internet Archive, and my job is to find and preserve this rich history of radio and communications. DLARC collects resources related to amateur radio, satellite communications, television, shortwave radio, pirate radio, experimental communications, and related communications.

In the two years since the project launched, DLARC has preserved thousands of magazines and journals, manuals, product catalogs, radio programs, and conference proceedings. These materials were scattered worldwide, often inaccessible and in obsolete formats. We’ve digitized material that was on paper, cassette tape, reel-to-reel tape, CD-ROMs, DVDs. We’ve digitized video from 16mm film, VHS, U-Matic, Betacam and even more obscure video formats.

We’ve built a collection of more than 140,000 items and made them available to the world. Researchers, academics, and hobbyists use the library to learn from the rich history of this 100-year-old hobby.

Learn more about DLARC

One reason this preservation is necessary is that the people creating history don’t always realize at the time that they’re creating history. In 1977, the creators of Amateur Radio Newsline—a weekly audio news bulletin—probably didn’t realize that their project would still be going on in 2024, 47 years later. And for all of their amazing work, if they had realized they were documenting history, they might have made more effort to save those recordings: the first 20 years of their work are missing. (DLARC has found some recordings from 1996, then most of them since 2012.)

Sometimes creators do recognize the importance of their effort. For more than six years, Len Winkler hosted Ham Radio & More, a radio show about amateur radio. Winker recorded every episode on cassette tape and managed to digitize many of the shows himself. However, the process of digitizing hundreds of episodes is tedious and he wasn’t able to complete it. With his approval, DLARC stepped in to finish the job. They’re all online now, more than 300 episodes including interviews with many notable names in the radio community.

There have been other huge successes: the entire 43-year run of 73 Magazine is digitized and online thanks to the publisher, Wayne Green, who donated the collection to Internet Archive before his death. Most issues of The W5YI Report, a ham radio newsletter that was published for 25 years, are online as well.

Download the complete Vanishing Culture report.

Attempting to preserve material years, or sometimes decades, after the fact makes systematic preservation nearly impossible. For every success story of content saved and archived, there is a heartbreaking story of loss. When amateur radio enthusiasts die, their media collections are often disposed of by survivors who don’t have any connection to amateur radio. File cabinets and bookcases full of (sometimes irreplaceable) materials are emptied into recycle bins.

Another challenge to preservation and access is membership organizations that keep their material behind paywalls. They sometimes prevent any of their information from being lent in an online library, which it is their right to do. However while they actively thwart efforts at preservation, it remains unclear whether those groups are adequately preserving their own history.

Some material is preserved intentionally, but a good amount was saved purely by accident. The material we recover and digitize has come from attics and basements, from libraries discarding obsolete material, from long-forgotten FTP sites, from scratched CD-ROMs, and from the estates of people who have passed.

So we float where the radio waves take us, trying to preserve the past as much as possible, while encouraging today’s content creators to consider how to make their material accessible to future generations.

About the author

Kay Savetz is curator of Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications. DLARC is funded by a grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications to create a free digital library for the radio community, researchers, educators, and students. If you have questions about the project or material to contribute, contact kay@archive.org.

Public Domain Spotlight: The Skeleton Dance

Disney’s classic animated short, “The Skeleton Dance,” is now in the public domain (Duke Law). Why is that such a big deal? Watch as Internet Archive’s Sean Dudley, a researcher specializing in the public domain, takes viewers on a tour of what makes “The Skeleton Dance” special, and why the film being open to remix and reuse is important for creators.

On Social

Transcript

Hi, my name is Sean, and I’m a researcher with the Internet Archive. One of the most iconic pieces to become public domain this year was 1929’s “The Skeleton Dance.”

This Disney short is revolutionary. 

Its synchronization of music and animation still holds up. Primarily animated by Ub Iwerks, the short feature skeletons turning into Lovecraftian monsters and getting down to some really cool beats.

This was in no small part thanks to Carl Stalling, who would later become famous for doing a lot of Looney Tunes music. And really being accented by the “Mickey Mouseing” effect of timing the animation to the music.

The beauty of this short is that it’s already building on the public domain with the music that it’s utilizing and taking inspiration from previous artists like Thomas Rowlandson for the skeleton designs.

And now because it’s public domain, you are able to remix, reuse, or do whatever you want with it. Because it’s ours. It belongs to all of us.

Efforts Underway to Preserve Historic Images of 1960s San Francisco and Find the Mystery Photographer Who Shot Them

Bill Delzell is trying to track down who took thousands of high-quality photos in the late 1960s in San Francisco and left the vast collection abandoned in a storage unit. The images include protests of the Vietnam War, the music scene with Jerry Garcia, and young people gathered in Golden Gate Park for the Human Be-In.

A commercial photographer himself, Delzell became interested in the mystery two years ago. Today, he is championing an effort to identify the person behind the camera and share the work broadly, including providing public access to the collection through the Internet Archive. He launched a Kickstarter campaign, “Who Shot Me — Stories Unprocessed” to help uncover clues and locate the photographer. Photographs shared on social media have attracted over 1.5 million views and the Kickstarter effort is advancing to its $49,000 goal. “It’s been quite a ride,” he said. “I think of myself as an advocate for this unknown photographer.”

So far, about 5,700 photos from 1966 to 1970 on black-and-white film and color slides have been developed ; another 75 rolls of 35mm film remain unprocessed. The images were discovered in the 1980s and passed hands through several dealers before Delzell was introduced to them through a friend.

“After turning a few pages in the collection, I had this overwhelming sense of loss,” said Delzell, 67, who worked as a photographer for over 30 years in San Francisco and now runs SpeakLocal.org, a nonprofit in Sacramento. “The idea that a person could devote five years of their life capturing so much of such an iconic era, and then to have become separated from it … my mind was spinning. I left with an awareness of the importance of the collection and preoccupied with how we could reconnect the photographer with their work.”

Now, his dream is to raise enough money to complete the restoration and uncover the mystery of the gifted photographer. The images would be of great value to educators, he said, teaching about that tumultuous time in American history.

“There is historical significance of the work,” Delzell said, who went to protests in the 1960s with his activist parents. “The idea of a community coming together to search for the identity of this individual, as well as individuals in the photograph, is what appeals to me. We’re still at a time where a lot of the people in those images are alive, and they can share their stories.”

Resources
– Kickstarter campaign: Who Shot Me — Stories Unprocessed
– Reddit: /WhoShotMe

Delzell has involved young people through his nonprofit organization dedicated to project-based learning. They are helping to scan the images and create a database through paid internships or school credit. The aim is to develop an interactive tool, and perhaps a book or documentary about the photos and quest for the photographer.

Once the work is shared with backers, Delzell wants it to be available to all on the Internet Archive. His plan is to preserve the collection and make it accessible with the public interest in mind.

Delzell credits the enthusiastic response to the project to the phenomenal era when the photos were taken. 

“If you think about any moment in the history of humankind, there’s probably never been a time that has had such a transformational impact on culture as the 60s,” he said. “To be able to dive into 8,000 images – all captured through the eye of one individual – is unique. Educators can add the images to their curriculum when they’re talking about subjects like the Civil Rights movement or the Summer of Love or the counterculture movement. It just really represents a great opportunity.”

LOST LANDSCAPES OF SAN FRANCISCO — Streets, People and Play: The Drama of Daily Life

January 13 @ 6:30pm – 9pm
Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco
Buy Tickets

This year’s LOST LANDSCAPES OF SAN FRANCISCO (the 19th!) casts an archival gaze on the lives of San Franciscans and Bay residents. Drawn from over 400 newly scanned archival films plus a few old favorites, this year’s film revels in the textures and activities of everyday life, labor and celebration, replaying known and unknown historical moments, daylighting lost and found infrastructures, revealing the scars of settlement and pointing to more hopeful futures. Highlights include intimate views of the Mission District, recently discovered BART films, coverage of Western Addition redevelopment and displacement, and much more. Almost all of the footage has not been shown before.

As always, the audience makes the soundtrack. Please come prepared to raise your voices; identify places, people and events; and ask questions of others in the audience.

By attending, you’ll directly contribute to supporting the Internet Archive. Rick Prelinger will be presenting as per usual. Don’t miss this opportunity to be a part of truly special evening!

Doors open at 6:30 pm. Film starts at 7:30 PM

No one will be turned away due to lack of funds!

January 13 @ 6:30pm – 9pm
Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco
Buy Tickets

Welcome to the Public Domain in 2025

Image credit: Montage of materials moving into the public domain in 2025. Duke Law Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

Celebrate the public domain with the Internet Archive in the following ways:

  • Register for our Public Domain Day celebrations on January 22 – both virtual and in-person.
  • Submit a short film to our Public Domain Film Remix contest.
  • Explore the works that have entered the public domain in 2025, below.

On January 1, 2025, we celebrate published works from 1929 and published sound recordings from 1924 entering the public domain! The passage of these works into the public domain celebrates our shared cultural heritage. The ability to breathe new life into long forgotten works, remix the most popular and enduring works of the time, and to better circulate the oddities we find in thrift stores, attics, and on random pockets of the internet are now freely available for us all.

While not at the same blockbuster level as 2024 with Steamboat Willie’s passage into the public domain, works from 1929 still inhabit strong cultural significance today. The works of 1929 continue to capture the Lost Generation’s voice, the rise of sound film, and the emerging modern moment of the 1920s. 

Musical Compositions

Show tunes and Jazz dominated the year with many standards that we remember today first being published. While best known for the 1952 film of the same name, Singin’ in the Rain was first published in 1929 and serves as the inspiration for our remix contest this year. George Gershwin also officially published (and copyrighted) his suite An American in Paris following a premiere in late 1928.

Below is sheet music for some popular compositions of the time.

Literature

Reflections on World War I continued with A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, the first English translation of All Quiet on the Western Front, and Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero. William Faulkner published his modernist novel The Sound and the Fury. A. A. Milne followed up 1928’s The House at Pooh Corner by adapting The Wind in the Willows into the play Toad of Toad Hall. Detective fiction thrived in 1929, with The Maltese Falcon serialized in Black Mask, Agatha Christie captivating readers with The Seven Dials Mystery, and the first Ellery Queen novel, The Roman Hat Mystery, making its debut. Explore our 1929 periodicals to find more hidden detective gems.

While not a towering work of literature, the first set of comic strips featuring Popeye also are joining the public domain. Popeye first made an appearance in Thimble Theatre on January 17, 1929. Initially just a side character for an adventure arc featuring gambling and sailing, Popeye rose quickly to fame. By February 4, 1931 the Thimble Theatre would feature a subtitle, Starring Popeye, before being renamed just Popeye later on.

Below is a further selection of works from the year:

Dive into Archive’s literary collection to unearth more classics from 1929.

Films

Last year Mickey Mouse made a splash with Steamboat Willie cruising into the public domain. This year TWELVE more Mickey shorts join to flesh out the notable events of Mickey’s young career. He speaks his first words in The Karnival Kid, he wears gloves for the first time in The Opry House, and Ub Iwerks leaves the studio at year’s end with Wild Waves. Disney animation also kickstarted their Silly Symphonies series with the haunting tales The Skeleton Dance and Hell’s Bells.

In 1929, if your film wanted to have any attention it needed sound. Musical films were everywhere with The Broadway Melody winning the second ever Best Picture award at the Oscars, The Hollywood Revue introducing the world to “Singin’ in the Rain”, and the Marx Brothers making their big screen debut with The Cocoanuts.

Below is a list of more significant films from the year:

Our film remix contest is ongoing until January 17, 2025, so please upload your submissions! Read more here.

Additional resources

In honor of Public Domain Day, this post is published with a CC0 Waiver dedicating it to the public domain.

Celebrate the Public Domain with the Internet Archive

On January 1, 2025, creative works from 1929 and sound recordings from 1924 will enter the public domain in the US.

1929 marked the last gasp of the roaring 20s and ushered in the Great Depression, a major economic crisis that would span the next 12 years. One thing we can see nearly a century later is that, in good times and bad, human creativity, knowledge, and culture persist. That year, Virginia Woolfe published her groundbreaking essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” advocating for female freedom of expression. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened in New York City, featuring the works of Van Gough, Cezanne, and Gauguin. Major movie studios put out not one, but two musicals starring all Black casts: “Halleluja” and “Hearts of Dixie.” Disney continued the Mickey Mouse trend with a dozen new animated shorts. And of course famous songs like “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and “Singin’ in the Rain” topped the charts.

Celebrate the public domain with us:

1. Creators: Enter the Public Domain Film Remix Contest

We invite filmmakers and artists of all skill levels to celebrate the public domain by creating and uploading 2–3 minute short films to the Internet Archive! Top entries will be awarded prizes up to $1,500. Contest details.

2. Virtual Celebration: January 22nd @ 10am PT

Join us on January 22 to get “that glorious feeling” of singin’ in the public domain! We’ll have an amazing virtual lineup of academics, librarians, musicians, artists and advocates coming together to celebrate this new class of works being free for everyone to enjoy. Register now!

3. In-Person Celebration: January 22nd @ 6pm PT

Please join us at our headquarters in San Francisco for a Celebration of the Public Domain! This year, we’re honoring 1929 — the year of the very first Academy Awards, held at the historic Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, CA. Put on your finest attire and get ready for an award-worthy evening. Register now!

4. Explore the public domain

Check out our recent post for links to the newly opened public domain resources at the Internet Archive.

Additional resources

  • Learn more about what’s moving into the public domain in 2025 from Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle of Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain.
  • Public Domain Review has a festive countdown to 2025.
  • Interested in what’s happening with the public domain in Europe? Communia is hosting a one-day event on January 9 in Brussels.

Staring into the Void

First, let’s get one myth out of the way: The Internet Archive has not been up, rock-steady and with no loss of service or connection, for twenty-eight years.

Starting out as a project to archive online materials, with a lot of speculative ideas of how to handle data at scale, the archive.org website was hosted at a shifting set of locations across its early years. It ran at razor-thin margins while rubbing hardware and software elbows with all sorts of then-famous sites; it directed its staff towards nebulous and aspirational goals while trying not to burn through its resources.

Stand back, we’re not sure how big this Archive is going to get.

A lot changed in October of 2001, when the Wayback Machine was introduced to the world at a ceremony at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, and the Web spontaneously developed something it hadn’t really had before: a memory.

That Memory went from a feature to a core utility for the internet.

Collections such as the Prelinger Library and the Live Music Archive were also coming along for the ride, providing a way for people to just get to the good stuff and not face down web banners and pop-up ads just to listen and watch culture from a growing set of sources and reaching back farther in time, to before the web itself.

Serving a massively-enlarging set of data to a massively-increasing audience became an engineering and cost problem, and ultimately the problem – how do you retrieve and provide terabytes, then hundreds of terabytes, then petabytes, then dozens of petabytes of data to your patrons without, again, falling to a thousand potential problems?

Photo by Ben Margot of Associated Press, 2006.

The short answer is that you work very hard with a very dedicated crew with a shared vision, but the longer answer is that sometimes, issues arise.

Many issues.

Network equipment crashes, power strip failures, unexpected configurations and firmware upgrades gone wrong. Unaccounted growth in files, surprise operating system limits, and countless other snags and roadbumps have hit the archive over nearly three decades. These problems are definitely not unique to the archive’s existence – many other websites and computers in the world experience the same snags.

Some of the snags have been localized – an item stops loading, or a filetype renders wrong in some browsers. Others will take out a rack of machines, a fleet of drives, and late nights or long days bring them back to service.

Further issues are even more generalized: Power outages due to weather or fire, or a cable (power or network) is sliced through by a misinformed construction crew. A solid heatwave takes some of the machines out for hours at a time.

Across the years, the Archive has had outages lasting minutes, hours, and even days.

In 2024, for the first time in recent history, it was weeks.

The Archive staff was now spending long days and nights auditing, assessing, and improving the entire infrastructure of the Archive, top to bottom. To the public, we looked completely down, and to some, waiting patiently and then less-patiently for the return of the site, they came to a conclusion: this was it.

For some people, the era of Internet Archive was over. The Wayback Machine, Open Library and the Internet Archive were, in one shocking stroke, gone.

This was, it turns out, not true. And it was also something surprising: an opportunity.

Among the things it is very difficult to do is attend your own funeral. You don’t get to stand among the mourners and hear their thoughts, and to find out what about you mattered to them, and what difference you made over the course of them knowing you.

You don’t hear the proclamations, the dedications, the thoughts about what inspirations and warnings your life held.

But in October, we did.

There is, naturally, an entire ecosystem dedicated to taking news about sites like the Archive being down and stretching them into 30 minute presentations, and there are articles and editorials about any events of note online.

But during this period of weeks, we also got to see the conversations, statements and posts of long-time users, who otherwise would not have communicated about their relationship with the holdings and offerings they’d used for so long.

For many people, the Archive is a standard part of their browsing life – a vast and complex shelf of media and pieces of culture that they reach out to in the process of their day.

For others, it’s a critical tool in their toolbox of research, be it verifying a source for an assignment or tracking down long-otherwise-removed sources that would be near impossible if not for the Wayback Machine or the stacks within the main site.

And the amount of people who spend their days and nights walking the collections, browsing idly and finding inspiration or entertainment or relief flipping through the items, is very significant.

The inherent invisibility of the Archive, however, can’t be ignored.

It’s clear that, for many patrons, when they look for something, they search for “SOMETHING internet archive” in their search engine or go directly to archive.org to search, but the existence of a “there” related to the archive had drifted into the background. The outage had brought the bulk of our collection and presence, the depth of it, into the foreground.

In this new attention came bewilderment at the downtime, and then a protective anger.

The Archive represents a shrinking population of sites on the web – it is not “for” a company or “for” shareholders, but is run and available “for” everyone, as much as it can afford, and facing down all the challenges that come with a constantly growing site being visited by millions of patrons, daily.

As time has passed and the years have progressed, it feels like the air you breathe and the water you drink: the place you walk through on your way to knowledge.

Staring into the void of a lost Internet Archive, people took to social media and communities to be scared, bothered, worried, and angry – and for many to recognize what part it plays in many people’s lives.

At the end of 2024, after a pretty tough year, with often-unsung employees within the Archive working incredible long and stressful hours to minimize the outages and downtime, it’s the comments from donors, posts on social media, and supportive communications (e-mail and otherwise) that have helped make everyone excited to face 2025 and beyond.

Usually, the tidal wave of users that pass through our machines remain as blinking lights on servers, and the Archive is simply a website that many people use. In this period of darkness and loss of access, everyone was reminded of the many other parts the archive plays in life, and that, at least, is a precious knowledge.

We’re glad to be back, and to be back with you. Here’s to the next year and the years to follow.

VERBATIM, Verbatim

By Erin McKean, editor of VERBATIM.

VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly began as a simple six-page pamphlet in 1974, a project launched by lexicographer Laurence Urdang as content marketing — before that was ever a term — for his reference-book publishing company. The quarterly soon outgrew that narrow focus, and within a few years was as many as thirty-two pages jam-packed with “recreational linguistics” articles by scholars, lexicographers, and other word enthusiasts, plus word puzzles and book reviews. 

Now you can find the entire run of the journal on the Internet Archive, under a Creative Commons license. The 125 issues are full-text searchable, and can be viewed online or downloaded as PDFs.

VERBATIM ceased publishing in 2008, but much of what it published remains evergreen. Although the journal is available in hard copy in many libraries, having it available via the Internet Archive makes it far more accessible to language enthusiasts! (Many thanks to Kay Savetz of the Archive, who volunteered to scan the paper copies.)

In addition to the new scans at the Archive, the VERBATIM website has relaunched with plain-text versions of the issues, and a full professional index. VERBATIM is now part of Wordnik Society, the 501c3 nonprofit that runs the online English language dictionary Wordnik.com.

A portion of the front page of Verbatim, December 1977 issue. Shows a stylized VERBATIM logo and the headline "We Do Not Only Talk With Our Mouths" - the cover article by Walburga von Raffler-Engel of Vanderbilt University

College Radio’s Rich Legacy: Latest Updates from DLARC

Highlights include 1980s radio interviews with LL Cool J, Sonic Youth and more, 1960s amateur radio footage, college radio oral histories, and radio station correspondence from the 1940s-1960s 

By Jennifer Waits, Curator of the DLARC College Radio Collection

Feast your eyes and ears on the latest additions to the college radio collection within the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications! Over the past few months we’ve added materials from numerous college radio stations and archives, including vintage and contemporary audio, film, and video pieces. 

Recruitment flyer from New York University college radio station WNYU

Most recently, the archivists at New York University student radio station WNYU-FM have contributed a number of 1980s radio interviews with music luminaries, including LL Cool J, ESG, members of Sonic Youth (Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore in 1984 and Kim Gordon in 1986), Billy Idol, and Jello Biafra. Also in the WNYU collection is audio from the station’s inaugural FM broadcast in 1973, plus paper items like program guides, flyers, and correspondence.

Another “first” broadcast recording, from campus-only AM station WWEC in 1963, is part of the Elizabethtown College Radio collection. Adding even more context to the story of radio on this Pennsylvania-based college campus is a collection of interviews conducted in 2014-2015 as part of the WWEC Oral History Project. Other WWEC items include station meeting minutes, history documents and a  Top 30 list from 1974. Elizabethtown College’s radio efforts were also represented by work done by its publicity office. Hundreds of pages of scripts for the shows “Campus Calling” and “From the Elizabethtown College Campus,” are other new additions to DLARC.

As was the case at Elizabethtown College, Auburn University also produced promotional radio programs that aired on local stations. Among the items that we’ve added from Auburn University are more than 2,000 installments of the weekly radio show “AU Profiles,” airchecks and shows recorded at student radio station WEGL, and a set of interviews about the history of WEGL.

But perhaps my favorite recent audio-visual addition is a compilation of 1960s home movies that document activities of University of Pennsylvania’s amateur radio club. They reside in our new Penn Amateur Radio Club archive, which collects items from this historically-significant club that began as the Wireless Club of the University of Pennsylvania in 1909. Early student wireless clubs were the incubators for future broadcast stations, so we hope to increase the representation of both high school and collegiate amateur radio clubs in DLARC.

Another area of curatorial interest is college radio at women’s colleges, especially since many women’s colleges built radio stations during the early carrier current boom in the 1940s and 1950s. DLARC’s new Smith College Radio Club and Stations collection provides context for understanding the college radio landscape during this time and what it was like for new stations trying to get their start. Within the collection are numerous folders full of correspondence, items from college radio conferences (including one hosted by Smith College station WCSR), organizational documents, scripts, and program schedules. Newer materials include flyers and program guides from the currently operating FM station at Smith: WOZQ-FM.  

Additionally, we continue to grow our collection of Intercollegiate Broadcasting System (IBS) materials. As mentioned in our July update, this college radio trade organization began in 1940 and has been hosting conventions and producing newsletters and other publications ever since. Since they don’t have their own archive, we’ve been piecing one together thanks to all the college radio stations and institutions that have carefully preserved IBS items over the years. 

As part of this effort, we added over 200 pages of IBS correspondence and related items from Smith College and have also sleuthed out various missing issues of IBS’ Journal of College Radio from a variety of sources, bringing our grand total to just about 100 issues. Do you have copies of IBS’ Journal of College Radio in your own collection? Our wish list includes College Radio (Volumes 1-3), Journal of College Radio (Volume 13.2, 19.4, 19.5, 20-22, 25.4 and any subsequent issues), and IBS newsletters and bulletins from many eras.

"Are you interested in radio" flyer from New York University college radio station WNYU

Finally, we have some new collections that we are just starting to populate. Take a peek at the WFMU and WHUS collections for more college radio goodies. And be sure to scope around DLARC College Radio to find other gems from stations where we haven’t established a designated collection. One of my favorites is a short animation demonstrating a Valentine’s Day-themed ‘zine from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s college radio station KCPR. 

The Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications is funded by a grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) to create a free digital library for the radio community, researchers, educators, and students. DLARC invites radio clubs, radio stations, archives and individuals to submit material in any format. To contribute or ask questions about the project, contact: Kay Savetz at kay@archive.org.