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.
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.
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.
