100 years of student radio history in the DLARC college radio collections

To mark College Radio Day, the Internet Archive’s Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications (DLARC) has expanded its college radio holdings with digitized materials tracing student radio back more than a century. Early campus radio activity is documented by a 1906 Harvard radio club (the Weld Phonepterograph Company) and by Dartmouth’s 1920s operations, which ran amateur station 1YB, secured experimental and commercial licenses (including WFBK), hosted lectures and code classes, and broadcast sporting reports and musical performances. Collections from the Milwaukee School of Engineering capture both ham and broadcast activity, with artifacts like QSL cards, construction plans, and 1980s WMSE metal charts showing airplay for bands such as Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax.

The holdings map a broader trajectory from early amateur experimentation to midcentury carrier-current campus stations and separate amateur and broadcast clubs that sometimes collaborated on technical work. Scanned items from Duke, Amherst, Middlebury, and William & Mary include clippings, posters, DJ manuals, program guides, studio notebooks with DJs’ scribbles, and scrapbooks that illuminate station operations and inter-station relations. DLARC, funded by ARDC and supplemented by a Vanishing Culture campaign, invites contributions from clubs and archives and provides contact information for those wishing to submit materials or ask questions.