A previously lost cache of celebrity and historical interviews from a long-dormant radio show have been discovered, digitized, and made available for all.
The Internet Archive is now home to 53 episodes of The Famous Computer Cafe, a 1980s radio show about the new world of home computers. The program included computer industry news, product reviews, and interviews, and aired from 1983 through 1986 on radio stations in southern and central California.
The creators of The Famous Computer Cafe saved every episode on reel-to-reel tapes, but over the years the tapes were forgotten, and, ultimately, lost. Earlier this year archivist Kay Savetz recovered several of the tapes in a property sale, and recognizing their value and worthiness of professional transfer, launched a GoFundMe to have them digitized, and made them available at Internet Archive with the permission of the show’s creators.
While full of time-capsule descriptions of 1980s technology news, the most exciting aspect of the show has been the variety and uniqueness of the interviews. The list of people that the show interviewed is a who’s-who of tech luminaries of the 1980s: computer people, musicians, publishers, philosophers, journalists. Interviews in the recovered recordings include Timothy Leary, Douglas Adams, Bill Gates, Atari’s Jack Tramiel, Apple’s Bill Atkinson, and dozens of others. The recovered shows span November 17 1984 through July 12, 1985.
Many more of the original reel-to-reel tapes — including shows with interviews with Ray Bradbury, Robert Moog, Donny Osmond, and Gene Roddenberry — are still lost, and perhaps are still waiting to be found in the Los Angeles area.
The stories of how The Famous Computer Cafe was created — and saved, 40 years later — is explored in an episode of the Radio Survivor podcast. The podcast interviewed show co-creator Ellen Fields and archivist Kay Savetz, providing a dual perspective of how the show was created and how it was recovered.
The recovery of these interviews, 40 years after their original airing, holds out hope that many more relics and treasures still await discovery.
Episode: ‘Meet the man archiving Biden’s presidency’
From POLITICO Tech: “The transition from one presidential administration to the next is generally thought to start around Election Day and end with the inauguration. But for the Internet Archive, it’s already underway. The nonprofit leads a coalition of libraries and universities that works to preserve the government’s digital history and to protect it from partisan tampering during administration changes. On POLITICO Tech, host Steven Overly discusses what it takes to archive a president with the Internet Archive’s Mark Graham.”
This October, we are publishing The Vanishing Culture Report, a new open access report examining the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.
As more content is created digitally and provided to individuals and memory institutions through temporary licensing deals rather than ownership, materials such as sound recordings, books, television shows, and films are at constant risk of being removed from streaming platforms. This means they are vanishing from our culture without ever being archived or preserved by libraries.
But the threat of vanishing is not exclusive to digital content. As time marches on, analog materials on obsolete formats—VHS tapes, 78rpm recordings, floppy disks—are deteriorating and require urgent attention to ensure their survival. Without proper archiving, digitization, and access, the cultural artifacts stored in these formats are in danger of being lost forever.
By highlighting the importance of ownership and preservation in the digital age, The Vanishing Culture Report aims to inform individuals, institutions, and policymakers about the breadth and scale of cultural loss thus far, and inspire them to take proactive steps in ensuring that our cultural record remains accessible for future generations.
Share Your Story!
As part of the Vanishing Culture report, we’d like to hear from you. We invite you to share your stories about why preservation is important for the media you use on our site. Whether it’s a website crawl in the Wayback Machine, a rare book that shaped your perspective, a vintage film that captured your imagination, or a collection that you revisit often, we want to know why preserving these items is important to you. Share your story now!
We have a new pop-up space at DWeb Camp this year: the Migration Station, a space for archiving migration mementos and self-organized workshops. The exact location is TBD, but it will be located near the Library and rock climbing station.
Planned layout of the Migration Station
Our theme of this year’s Camp is Migration: Moving Together — to touch upon what is a pertinent reality for so many worldwide, and relate their experience to the DWeb. Beyond a poetic metaphor for moving people from the centralized web to the decentralized web, we’d like to acknowledge how masses of people are displaced due to war, genocide, climate change, and other reasons, for the sake of survival. We want to reflect on how network technology can address their needs amidst catastrophe.
And along this theme, we’re inviting all Campers to bring a small memento (up to 5×5 inches/120×120 mm) to reflect on their own personal, or resonant, migration stories. At the Migration Station, you will be able to photograph the item, write a note, and record an audio story using the Custodisco and Audiovisco kiosks.
Photo of the Custodisco Kiosk, where you can photograph and add your migration story to the digital memento archive.
Over the course of the week, you will have an opportunity to add your objects and stories. After Camp, we will take this archive, as well as a carefully selected set of small objects folks are willing to part with, and create both a digital and physical time capsule to be buried for 24 years and unearthed in 2048. The physical time capsule will be buried at the Internet Archive. The digital time capsule will be preserved using a variety of different DWeb tools and protocols in order to practically test different approaches for cultural preservation.
The exact location where we’re planning on burying the physical time capsule, at the Internet Archive garden.
Memento Ideas
Possible mementos include: A copy of family photo or historical document; a shawl, scarf or other textiles that was worn or used to carry objects; hand made art, small statues, talismans or other religious artifacts; an interesting rock from a special place; jewelry, baskets, bags, or even an old key and the story of what it once unlocked.
If you’re unable to bring a memento, you can always visit the Art Barn to create something at Camp.
A very limited number of objects will fit into the time capsule, so if you’d like your object to be considered for inclusion, please bring a memento that is no larger than a CD and is robust enough to survive for 24 years underground (i.e. no low quality paper or organic material). If your object is larger than a CD, or you don’t want to part with your object for sentimental reasons, you will still have the opportunity to create an entry in the digital archive recording your object and its story.
Above is a photo of DWeb Camp’s Executive Producer, Wendy Hanamura’s grandmother and grandfather. Wendy will be archiving the story of how both of her grandmothers came to the United States as picture brides through Angel Island in California.
Migration Station Workshops
Throughout the week, the space will also offer self-organizing workshops, including:
Collective story sharing/listening
Archive exploration sessions
Discussions on archiving experiences
Map drawing workshops
Working with the archival material (ex. noise cleaning, translations)
Reviewing favorite archived materials
Discussions on the future significance of the archive
We hope you bring your mementos, stories, and dreams.
Guest blog by ngọc triệu, DWeb Fellowship Director
The DWeb Camp 2024 theme is “Migration: Moving Together.” Migration, in the context of decentralization, involves moving people and their data to a more open, secure, equitable, and accessible decentralized web. It is a call for collective action and resource gathering that will not only enable these migrations, but also surface and address the various issues that come with them.
Conversely, communities experience forced migration due to war, environmental degradation, corporate land grabs, and political forces beyond their control. Decentralized and distributed tools can offer significant benefits to these displaced populations by providing solutions to secure identity verification, access to resources and currency, censorship resistance, data sovereignty, and the preservation of cultural artifacts. We’ve learned this through the story of the stateless Rohingya people and how they’ve overcome authoritarian controls to preserve their identity and culture, the story of how Maasai Tribespeople of Tanzania locate and map their oral storytelling traditions about places of significant meaning, and the story of how communities in repressive environments bypass censorship or maintain secure community-owned and operated networks in the face of Internet shutdowns and intermittent connectivity.
Tools are better when they are built with the communities they are intended to serve. This is why the DWeb Fellowship Program seeks out people who work directly with marginalized communities, or in service to them. Often, our Fellows find themselves navigating the harsh realities of repressive regimes, striving to challenge and counteract the many oppressive forces at play. These exceptional individuals stand on the frontlines, harnessing technology to forge pathways to liberation, resilience, agency, and autonomy for those who need it most.
This year, we are honored to welcome 25 Fellows from 21 countries across Europe, North America, South America, East Asia, South Asia, West Africa, East Africa, and the Middle East — 21 of whom will be joining us in the ancient Redwoods of California, eager to share their knowledge, learn, and connect.
Our Fellows represent a diverse tapestry of cultural and professional backgrounds. They are human rights activists, technologists, educators, community organizers, archivists, researchers, artists, musicians, scientists, cultural conservationists, civil society workers, and digital security experts. Through intersectional approaches to decentralization and decolonization, our Fellows fight for environmental and social justice. Together, they strive to ensure equal access to knowledge, enhance security and privacy, and uphold sovereignty and autonomy for their communities. Together, they spearhead the DWeb movement, moving toward a more just, inclusive, and accessible web.
Please meet our 2024 DWeb Fellows:
Alex Zhang
Alex Zhang is strongly passionate about research and activism in the areas of censorship measurement and circumvention. Over the past five years, the work he led has helped millions of users in China and Iran to bypass various emerging censorship challenges during politically sensitive periods of time. His work has thus received media coverage and several awards: the IMC 2020 Best Paper Runner-up, the 2023 Best Practical Paper Award from the FOCI community, First Place in the CSAW 2023 Applied Research Competition, and the IETF/IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize in 2024. Additionally, Zhang has been contributing to the GFW Report, an English and Chinese website focused on studying and understanding censorship incidents in China.
Andreas Dzialocha is an electric bass player, producer, composer and developer. His work consists of both digital and physical environments, spaces, festivals, software or platforms for participants and listeners. The computer itself serves as an artistical, political, social or philosophical medium, dealing with computer culture, machine learning, platform politics or decentralized networks.
He is member of the band Sun Kit with Jules Reidy, member of the Berlin-based community computing space offline, co-founder and core-contributor of the local-first protocol p2panda, co-founder of the music label Hyperdelia and the intermedial score platform Y-E-S. Sometimes he teaches artistic computer practices, recently at UdK Berlin. He studied art history, musicology, media philosophy and computer science in Berlin where he also lives and works.
Batool advocates for transforming cultural norms to facilitate the adoption of open research practices, tools, and ethos, while addressing the existing power dynamics and inequalities in knowledge production. She believes that Open science is fundamentally about decolonization by challenging the legacy of settler colonialism, which often marginalized indigenous knowledge systems, and by promoting the integration and respect of these diverse perspectives in the broader scientific discourse. She founded the Open Science community in Saudi Arabia (OSCSA), which introduces and contextualizes Open Science practices in Arabic-speaking countries.
Batool is actively engaged as a mentor and governance committee member for The Open Life Science program. She is also a core contributor to The Turing Way and a member of the Open Science expert group organized by the International Association of Universities (IAU) where she co-develop a new approaches to assessments of and incentives for researchers to engage in Open Science in the Universities.
When she’s not coding, Batool loves going on spontaneous road trips to explore new places.
Bendjedid Rachad Sanoussi is a telecom engineer passionate about environmental protection, focusing on sustainable solutions to socio-economic and environmental challenges. Currently, Rachad is pursuing a PhD in digital and artificial intelligence for management.
As Technical Lead at Digital Grassroots, a youth-led organization enhancing local digital citizenship, Rachad led the Digital Rights Monopoly project, creating a virtual platform for decentralized power distribution and amplifying marginalized youth voices.
Rachad’s interest in internet-related issues began in 2016 with the Internet Society Benin, where he now serves as Secretary-General. At Digital Grassroots, he curated the Community Leaders Program for Internet Advocacy, focusing on democratic participation through the Internet. He also coordinated the universal access and meaningful connectivity working group for the Project Youth Summit. As an Open Internet Leader, Rachad collaborated with the AU-EU Digital for Development Hub to represent youth at the 17th Internet Governance Forum (IGF).
Rachad received the Youth Digital Champion Award and the Inaugural Paul Muchene Fellow Award, honoring an ICANN staff member dedicated to enhancing the Internet’s resilience. He advocates for youth inclusion in environmental and digital policies and aspires to become a policy analyst. His hobbies include agriculture, tourism, and football.
Billion is Taiwanese and a co-founder of Cofacts. She started this project in 2016 and she has been advocating for marriage equality and open freedom, dedicating herself to connecting different communities and providing empowerment courses to combat disinformation. She has previously visited PolitiFact in the United States as a fellow. She has exchanged and connected contributors from different countries, to collaborate on clarifying information. She manages a community working on OSINT fact-checking skills and media literacy. She likes cakes and cookies.
Evan Hahn is a computer programmer based in Chicago. He works at Awana Digital (previously known as Digital Democracy) building Mapeo, a Hypercore-powered mapping app used by frontline communities to defend their environmental and human rights. Previously, Evan worked at Signal, the encrypted messenger.
fauno’s work and activism focus on investigating, re-thinking, adapting, modifying, and implementing ecological and resilient technologies, especially autonomous, collectively managed infrastructure.
He has been involved in free software and hacktivist communities since 2007, with a special interest in the intersection of technology and grassroots organization. This interest led him to work on technology development from intersectional, trans-feminist, anti-oppressive, decolonial, and ecological perspectives, along with many friends and colleagues.
In the last six years, he has been working almost exclusively on resilient websites and developing a platform for updating and hosting them called Sutty, which is also the name of the worker-owned cooperative through which he sustains this work.
This work has led him into the dweb space. Through his alliance with Distributed Press, the websites built at Sutty are available on several distributed protocols, and lately, he has enabled social interactions through ActivityPub, the protocol for the Fediverse.
Juan Cruz was born in Venezuela and has been living in Colombia for 6 years. He’s currently a final semester student pursuing a degree in Systems and Computer Engineering. His journey with community networks began over two years ago when he joined Red Fusa Libre. What started as a quest for knowledge and a desire to contribute has grown into a deep passion for connecting marginalized communities with the world.
He is dedicated to community networks stems from witnessing firsthand the transformative impact of internet access in underserved areas. Through his work at Colnodo, Juan has been involved in implementing and supporting various community-driven initiatives across Colombia. These experiences have not only sharpened my technical skills but also taught him invaluable lessons in empathy, collaboration, and resilience.
Juan is committed to advocating for decentralized technologies and believes in empowering communities through digital inclusion. His goal is to leverage technology to bridge the digital divide, ensuring that everyone has equitable access to information and opportunities.
As a software developer and sociologist, Marie Kochsiek (she/her) is particularly interested in the intersections between societies, technologies and sexual health. She is an active member of the Heart of Code, a feminist hackspace in Berlin. With a team of three she started the drip app, a free and open source period and fertility tracking app.
Melquiades (Kiado) Cruz is a prominent Zapotec communicator, activist, and researcher from the community of Yagavila in the Rincón de la Sierra Norte of Oaxaca. He is a co-founder of SURCO, Servicios Universitarios y Redes de Conocimientos en Oaxaca, A.C. where he has worked to support community media projects, access to information, open source technologies, and community education. He is currently contributing to the INDIGITAL initiative, a collaborative project focused on ensuring access to information in indigenous languages and data. He was a 2023 participant in the LACNIC (Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry) Líderes Program on Internet Governance, and will be a Digital Civil Society Lab Technology & Racial Equity Practitioner Fellow with the Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford University during the 2024-25 academic year.
Nádia Coelho (she/her) is an electrical engineer, who’s been studying regenerative agriculture for the last five years. After spending three years visiting and researching alternative farming experiences throughout Brazil, she established herself in the Atlantic Rainforest in the State of São Paulo. There, she co-founded Tekoporã, a project focused on building tailor-made digital systems for agroecological social organizations, using proper tools with free software and hardware.
Nat Decker (they/them) is a Chicago-born Los Angeles-based artist interrogating the politicality of the alienated body/mind networked within a call for collective care and liberation. Working critically with technology, they identify the computer :::as a portal::: as an assistive tool affording a more accessible and capacious practice. They reflect on the virtual as a space of potential requiring contestation for the ways it mirrors patterns of exploitation and exclusion. Their practice fundamentally integrates accessibility, collectivism, and friction as generative mediums.
Working with computational and sculptural processes, they trace serpentine connections between the body and modes of technology. They render the mobility device/disabled body as cultural expansion and agitation of conventional desirability politics, as formal object laden with stigma while freedom-giving, sterile and metallic while sensual and soft, (un)aestheticized while interacting with designations of usefulness, function, and capitalistic innovation.
Nat is a 2024 Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellow with their collective Cripping_CG, a Y10 member of NEW INC and was a 2023 Processing Foundation Fellow. They are also a community organizer and access worker. In June 2022, they graduated from UCLA with a degree in Design|Media Arts and Disability Studies.
Muhammad Noor, a Rohingya visionary and the founder of the Rohingya Project, is a pioneer in blockchain for social and financial inclusion for stateless communities. His multifaceted role extends to founding and directing impactful institutions, including the globally acclaimed Rohingya Vision (RVISION) TV broadcast station, watched by millions worldwide. With vast expertise in journalism, humanitarian work, and corporate leadership, Noor actively uses technologies such as Blockchain, AI, Crypto, Metaverse, Data Science, security, and privacy to benefit marginalized people. He also mentors students and has given talks on refugee issues and technology at universities throughout the world.
Sarah Grant is an American media artist and educator based in Berlin, Germany. She is a member of the Weise7 studio in Berlin and Lecturer in the Digital Arts program at Die Angewandte in Vienna, Austria. She holds a Bachelors of Arts in Fine Art from UC Davis and a Masters of Professional Studies in Media Arts from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Her teaching and media art practice engages with the electromagnetic spectrum and computer networks as artistic material, social habitat, and political landscape. With a focus on radio art and computer networking, she researches and develops artworks as educational tools and workshops that demystify computer networking and radio technology. Since 2015, she has organized the Radical Networks conference in New York and Berlin, a community event and arts festival for critical investigations and creative experiments in telecommunications.
Senka Hadzic is a telecom engineer, researcher and public interest technologist working on affordable connectivity solutions for remote areas and disadvantaged populations. She is part of the iNethi team, a Cape Town based project enabling decentralized content distribution in community networks, and collaborating with Grassroots Economics to bootstrap circular economy in the communities by using a locally-owned network and community inclusion token as a catalyst.
Shadrach Ankrah is an Information Technology (IT) Specialist and the Founder and Executive Director of Connect Rurals, a nonprofit organization focused on bridging the digital divide in rural and underserved communities in Ghana. The organization provides digital skills training including coding and graphic design, and is committed to connecting rural communities to the Internet to provide access to various opportunities. He advocates for Internet access and has actively participated in Internet governance discussions and initiatives since 2017. He has mentored and guided over 150 youths on Internet governance issues, helping them navigate the ecosystem and contribute to the development of the Internet. He is affiliated with various global Internet organizations, including the Internet Society (ISOC), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC), and the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF). Shadrach has been a fellow at ICANN72 & ICANN77, AFRINIC-31, and the 2019 Hackathon@AIS (Africa Internet Summit). His vision is to see rural and underserved African communities have access to decentralized technologies and tools that provide them with Internet access, digital literacy, and job opportunities.
Stacco Troncoso is an avid synthesizer of information and a radical polymath working towards elemental, people-led change on a burning planet.
Stacco lives, breathes, teaches and writes on the Commons, P2P politics and economics, open culture, post-growth futures, Platform and Open Cooperativism, decentralized governance, blockchain and more as part of DisCO.coop, Commons Transition and Guerrilla Translation.
Tanveer Anoy (They/Them) is a Bangladeshi queer author, academic, archivist, and human rights activist. Anoy has provided leadership and edited several queer print productions. As a writer, Anoy addresses critical socio-political issues such as the gender binary, bullying, and religious violence. Anoy is the founder of MONDRO, the first and largest Bangladeshi queer archive that collects and preserves the artistic and cultural history of communities of marginal gender and sexual diversities. Anoy also established Bangladesh Feminist Archives, a comprehensive digital platform dedicated to preserving, documenting, and promoting the intersectional feminist movement in Bangladesh.
Wassim Alsindi is the founder and creative director of the 0xSalon, which conducts experiments in post-disciplinary collective knowledge practices. A veteran of the timechain, Wassim specializes in conceptual design and philosophy of peer-to-peer systems, on which he writes, speaks, teaches, and consults. He has an editorial column at the MIT Computational Law Report, and he co-founded MIT’s Cryptoeconomic Systems journal and conference series. Wassim has curated arts festivals, led a sculptural engineering laboratory and published experimental music, satirical theater, fiction, games, poetry, and speculative scripture. Wassim holds a Ph.D. in ultrafast supramolecular photophysics from the University of Nottingham.
As a Gen-Z artist, Ziye Zhang leverages diverse digital tools and mediums to delve into contemporary culture and the nuances of social life in the digital era, highlighting the unique challenges encountered by the Digital Native Community. Additionally, Ziye has a high level of expertise in emerging technologies in VR, virtual production, and motion capture.
Ziye also uses his game design knowledge to encourage people to solve social issues through games and hosts board game design workshops at MIT, NYU, etc. In addition, Ziye is an invited guest speaker by Hasbro China.
Now, he is conducting field research and studies for his new works, which will discuss individual consciousness neglected on the internet through interactive installations, continuing to refine his theoretical research and artistic language.
Zoe is a software consultant, open source advocate, and conference organizer. Her work often focuses on underserved communities. She is currently working to restart Oakland’s Sudomesh network. Away from tech, her hobbies include photography, fixing bicycles, and flying and maintaining experimental aircraft.
Fendji is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Ngaoundere, Cameroon, and Research Director at Afroleadership. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Bremen, Germany. Post-Ph.D., he collaborated with German cooperation initiatives in Cameroon to establish community networks in the northern regions of the country. With APC funding, he proposed a regulatory framework for community networks in Francophone African countries.
Fendji’s recent research interests include artificial intelligence, particularly natural language processing, sustainable agriculture, education, and addressing bias and ethical issues. He collaborated with the Alan Turing Institute on the ADJRP project and held sessions at the Mozilla Festival. In 2021, he facilitated the UNESCO Forum on Youth and AI in Yaoundé.
He has been awarded fellowships at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study and the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study. Fendji is a member of the ICT and AI Commission at the National Committee for Technology Development in Cameroon and mentors in the African track of the Scaling Responsible AI Solutions project led by CEIMIA and GPAI.
Michael Suantak, also known as Pumsuanhang Suantak, is a distinguished social innovator and entrepreneur known for his impactful work in Myanmar and India. He founded and directs ASORCOM (Alternative Solutions for Rural Communities), where he has established community wireless networks connecting over 20 remote jungle villages in Myanmar’s Chin State, providing vital educational content and local news. Beginning his career as a founding member of the Burma Information Technology (BIT) team in 2002 and later serving as an organizational manager in New Delhi, Suantak has also become a prominent digital and cybersecurity trainer. His expertise includes policy development, law, and integrating modern technology into education across Asia. As a DeBoer fellow, he leads digital and cybersecurity research at ASORCOM, enhancing community development through strategic internet and wireless technology use.
Nzambi is an experienced and skilled professional with a strong background in data collection, operations, program support, and project Implementation. Her work has involved collaboratively designing, implementing, and coordinating projects with data, technology, and design components, making her well-equipped to contribute to the DWeb ecosystem.
She is a techie who believes that her passion for using technology to address societal issues, combined with her strong project management and research capabilities, makes her a valuable asset in the pursuit of a more decentralized, equitable, and inclusive web. She looks forward to engaging with the DWeb Community and exploring ways in which she can collaborate to advance the DWeb movement.
Shalini finished her Bachelors of Engineering in Tumkur and joined Servelots and Janastu soon after. And that was 15 years ago. After realizing that her role is essential for keeping the programs of working with communities alive she decided to get involved with all activities of the organizations including keeping the account books ready! Now she is working with the village women in various capacities — craft center to local mesh deployment, while also handling the overall management of activities of the organizations. One of them being the decentralization of a platform that caters to keeping the local knowledge, much of which also has personal stories of women. Shalini works with the women, listening to their stories and keeping it for next iteration. In the meantime, the stories are shared with the people the women trust and annotated so they can get back fast to things that are of interest to them. This also means that the annotations will be media that will be tagged. Most women are not literate so we have a way of asking them to associate with a person who they trust and can use the system. Shalini and her team are looking at ways to include them as first class users of the system – with face and voice recognition to start.
Taslim is a software engineer at eQualitie, an open-source company dedicated to developing tools for online freedom and privacy. He contributes actively to the company’s open-source browser, Ceno Browser, which aims to provide secure access to online content for all users worldwide.
By Jennifer Waits, Curator of the DLARC College Radio Collection
In fall 2023, after learning about the amazing breadth of The Internet Archive’s Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications (DLARC), I started to dream about what a college radio version of that collection would look like. I shared with curator Kay Savetz some of my “wish-list” items, which developed into a plan to develop a college radio collection within DLARC.
Launched in February 2024, DLARC’s college radio collection now contains more than 1,300 items related to student radio’s past and present. Materials in the collection include ‘zines, radio station program guides, flyers, playlists, correspondence, books, academic theses, magazines, and more.
Publication highlights include KDViationS, the ‘zine/program guide produced by student radio station KDVS at UC Davis; RiFLe from University of Kentucky’s college radio station WRFL; and program guides from WHRB (Harvard), KUCI (UC Irvine), and WMBR (MIT).
Additionally, we’ve created a handful of radio station collections for KFJC (Foothill College), WKNC (North Carolina State University), WTUL (Tulane University) and WSUA/WCDB (University at Albany). Take a trip back in time to find 1970s “music surveys,” punk flyers from the 1980s, radio station handbooks, brochures, and other ephemera.
College radio’s storied history stretches back to the early days of radio, with the first student stations launching in the 1920s. One of the initial goals of DLARC’s college radio collection is to locate items from not only the early days of college radio, but also from long-standing college radio trade organizations like The Intercollegiate Broadcasting System (IBS). Established in 1940, IBS began as a trade organization for campus-only AM carrier-current radio stations. It has been producing newsletters, publications, educational manuals, and conferences since its inception.
Despite IBS’ long history, it does not maintain its own archive; so it’s significant that we have built an Intercollegiate Broadcasting System collection within DLARC’s college radio collection. Now at over 200 items, the IBS materials include conference guides, promotional pieces, IBS newsletters from the 1950s, 1960s-era correspondence with radio stations, and nearly 80 issues of College Radio/The Journal of College Radio from 1966 to 1982. Full of station profiles, FCC updates, music industry reports, engineering tips, and more; College Radio/The Journal of College Radio was produced from 1965 to the early 1990s. We are still filling in gaps in the collection and are searching for more issues of this publication, as well as IBS’ earlier publications from the 1940s and 1950s (IBS Bulletin and IBS Newsletter).
These materials give scholars and college radio enthusiasts a richer picture of the history of college radio and the ways that student radio practitioners have intersected with both the broader radio community and music culture. If you have college radio materials that you’d like to donate to DLARC, please reach out!
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.
George Smart is on a mission to save mid-century modern houses. He believes the structures are works of art that people should respect—if they only realized their significance and knew how to preserve them.
George Smart, founder and chief executive officer of USModernist
Smart relies on the Internet Archive to maintain his open digital collection of modernist residential homes along with back issues of architectural magazines. He uses the Wayback Machine to find architectural firm websites and search for vintage publications.
“I find the Internet Archive is great…curated in a certain way and very organized,” Smart said. “They are trying to innovate all the time and figure out ways to archive different kinds of materials.”
About 10 years ago, Smart launched USModernist Archives, a nonprofit dedicated to chronicling the work of notable architects and educating the public about their masterpieces built roughly from 1945 to 1969. Its Architect and House Archives includes the life work of 150 architects, such as Frank Lloyd Wright and John Lautner, and details of 21,000 houses, including photos, address and renovation histories.
1954 Catalano House, Raleigh NC. Designed by Eduardo Catalano.
The USModernist’s Architecture Magazine Library features nearly 5 million scanned, searchable, and downloadable pages from Architectural Forum, Progressive Architecture, and others. Smart said digital access to these legacy publications is critical for those researching how to preserve Modernist houses. Beyond the articles, the ads for doors, windows, tile and even door knobs provide clues for homeowners trying to renovate.
To get the word out, Smart also has a podcast, USModernist Radio, that has featured 650 guests from all over the world on more than 350 shows.
Smart, who is founder and chief executive officer of USModernist, said he uses Internet Archive several times a week in his research. He said he appreciates the ease of access and marvels at the wide range of information available.
“The internet is vast and the Internet Archive is archiving it frequently over the course of a year,” he said. “That’s pretty impressive.”
Because the Internet Archive has been so useful to building USModernist, Smart said he wanted to support the library as a donor. Joining the Monthly Giving Circle, he said, is convenient and ensures his continued support.
The Bunker House, Concord MA. Designed by Walter Gropius.
By combining his organization’s resources and those of the Internet Archive, Smart said he’s able to discover and document materials useful for historic preservation. “For me, it’s a thrill. We’re finding houses that have been off the radar for sometimes as many as 70 years,” he said. “The Internet Archive is helping us find the missing pieces.”
Smart’s vision? “To have a complete record of the mid-century modernist movement with profiles of the houses and architects—and everything that was ever published about these houses.”
When MTVNews.com went offline in late June, Internet users were quick to discover that some (but sadly, not all) of the site had been archived in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. While you can no longer browse MTV News directly on the web, the archived pages are available via the Wayback Machine, starting with the first crawl of the site on July 5, 1997.
Why provide search indexes to music news? Because, as Michael Alex, founding editor of MTV News Digital, wrote in an op-ed for Variety, “the archives of MTV News and countless other news and entertainment organizations have a similar value: They’re a living record of entertainment history as it happened.”
It’s important to remember that these collections were captured as a routine part of the daily work conducted by more than one thousand libraries and archives collaborating with the Internet Archive to archive the web. For centuries, libraries have been the trusted repositories of culture and knowledge. As our news and information sources move increasingly digital, the role of libraries like the Internet Archive and our partners has changed to meet these new demands. This is why libraries like ours exist, and why web archiving is critical for preserving our shared digital culture.
In my newsletter Zero Retries, I write about interesting developments in Ham Radio to folks like me whose primary interest in Ham Radio is experimenting with the more advanced technological possibilities of Ham Radio. Such developments include communicating with data modes locally and worldwide (Packet Radio), using Ham Radio satellites and communicating with Ham Radio astronauts on the International Space Station, and developing M17, a new two way radio technology based entirely on open source (to mention just a few).
One of my favorite ways to use the DLARC (nearly 120,000 items now, and still growing) is to re-explore ideas that were proposed or attempted in Ham Radio, but for various reasons, didn’t quite become mainstream. Typically, the technology of earlier eras simply wasn’t up to some proposed ideas. But, with the technology of the 2020s such as cheap, powerful computers and software defined radio technology, many old ideas can be reexamined with perhaps succeed in becoming mainstream now. The problem has been that much of the source material for such “reimagining” has been languishing in file cabinets or bookcases of Ham Radio Operators like me, with nowhere to go. With the grant, IA could hire a dedicated archivist and began receiving, scanning, hosting, and aggregating electronic versions of old Ham Radio material.
One of my favorite examples of maybe we should try this again? is a one page flyer for a radio unit designed for data – the NW Digital Radio UDRX-440. That radio was a leading-edge idea in 2013, but didn’t become a product. One reason for that fate was that it required a small but powerful computer that NW Digital Radio was forced to develop itself, which was expensive. More than a decade later, the computer that NW Digital Radio required, with a quad-core, 1.8 GHZ processor and 1 GB of RAM is available off-the-shelf – for $35. Perhaps it’s time for an innovative Ham Radio manufacturer to try creating something like the UDRX-440 again. Being able to provide a link to illustrate such a concept, and prove that one manufacturer got as far as the design stage, can be inspirational.
Another example maybe we should try this again? is the PACSAT system, a data-communications protocol and hardware specification for Ham Radio satellites that combined multiple receivers with a single high speed transmitter for more efficient throughput of data. In the 1990s, PACSAT was proposed and several satellites were actually built and put into orbit. But then, PACSAT required dedicated, expensive, specialized hardware suitable only for a satellite. In the 2020s, a PACSAT system could replace a Ham Radio repeater with a software defined receiver (can now listen to multiple frequencies) and a few other off-the-shelf parts. The difference that DLARC makes is that all the original reference material for PACSAT can easily be found in DLARC. If some graduate student were to email me looking for a project, I can suggest that they create a “PACSAT 2025” – and point them to all of the PACSAT material in DLARC.
Many new Ham Radio Operators live in “restricted” living arrangements such as apartments, condominiums, or communities that don’t allow external antennas. Thus, to operate on the Ham Radio “High Frequency – HF” bands (shortwave) bands, some “creativity” is required – a stealthy antenna. One of my favorite collections within DLARC is 73 Magazine which was published monthly for 43 years, with many, many antenna construction articles such as the “compressed W3EDP” HF antenna that would fit into an attic. Unlike current Ham Radio magazines, all 516 issues of 73 Magazine can be browsed, and downloaded, and because Internet Archive does optical character recognition (OCR), every word of every issue is keyword searchable.That, is powerful and ample “food for the imagination” of Ham Radio Operators looking to the past for some interesting projects to tackle.
Those are just a few examples of the utility of DLARC from my perspective. Ham Radio has existed for more than a century, but prior to DLARC, there was no comprehensive online archive of Ham Radio material. There were some personal archives, some Ham Radio clubs and organizations had their newsletters online, but there was no comprehensive online archive of Ham Radio material. DLARC is now the archive that Ham Radio has been missing. Most significantly, unlike some Ham Radio organizations, material in DLARC is free for public access (though some material is subject to Controlled Digital Lending). DLARC includes club newsletters (from all over the world), Ham Radio books and magazines (some from very early in the 20th century), audio recordings, video recordings, conference proceedings… literally a treasure trove of knowledge and ideas and inspiration.
Thank you Internet Archive and Archivist Kay Savetz K6KJN for all the hard work in creating and growing Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications – we really appreciate it (and I use it nearly every day).
Steve Stroh Amateur Radio Operator N8GNJ Bellingham, Washington, USA
The publishers’ lawsuit against our library is featured in the latest episode of “Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast.”
Listen in as Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive’s digital librarian, talks with Chris Hayes about the future of libraries, and what the publishers’ lawsuit means for libraries & their patrons in the digital age. Chris & Brewster are joined by librarian and lawyer, Kyle K. Courtney.
