Vanishing Culture: Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications

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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 color correction 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.