Happy College Radio Day! In honor of the annual celebration of student radio (this year on October 2), we invite you to explore the college radio collections in the Internet Archive’s Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications (DLARC). Some of the latest additions include materials that shed light on college radio’s earliest days.

College Radio Club Launches at Harvard in 1906

In the first decade of the 20th century, radio clubs started to form on college campuses. In 1906, students at Harvard University offered to send wireless messages across “the yard” as part of the activities of the Weld Phonepterograph Company, which founder Robert Gowen described as “the first college radio club” in a 1923 article for Radio News. Robert Rydzewski digs into the story of this largely forgotten club at Harvard in a 2023 article for The Antique Wireless Association Review, which can also be found in DLARC. Other clubs followed and while they focused primarily on what we think of as amateur or ham radio, these groups were also responsible for some of the first student-created radio broadcasts and student-built college radio stations in the 1920s.

Radio Clubs and Broadcast Experiments in the 1920s

Recently added items to DLARC from the archives of the Dartmouth College Radio Association help to tell the early story of college radio. By June 1920, the club operated amateur station 1YB, hosted guest lecturers on radio-related topics, and ran code classes. In 1924, licenses were obtained for both an experimental station and a commercial broadcast station (WFBK). Located in the Wilder Physics Laboratory, WFBK’s brief time on the air included reports from sporting events and performances by campus music groups. A newspaper account at the time explained that a radio communication class utilized the broadcast station’s facilities for sending and receiving Morse code messages as well.

Newly added materials from The Milwaukee School of Engineering represent the wide range of radio-related activities at the school, including courses, amateur radio stations, and broadcast radio (beginning in the early 1920s). Within the Milwaukee School of Engineering Amateur Radio collection, there are clippings from campus publications, QSL cards, and construction plans for a “high grade radio-phone.” The Milwaukee School of Engineering Radio Stations collection contains items related to broadcast stations on campus, including current station WMSE-FM and its predecessors WIAO and WSOE. Gems in the collection include WMSE metal charts from the 1980s, which reported on airplay for new music releases from bands like Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax.

New Additions to Campus Radio Collections

While perusing the DLARC College Radio collection, one can see the trajectory of college radio, especially as campus-only carrier current transmissions became more common throughout the 1940s and 1950s. By this point, we see separate student organizations devoted to either amateur radio or college radio of the broadcast variety, although at times, the clubs might collaborate on technical projects. The Duke University Radio collection contains many article clippings and photos of student station WDBS from the 1950s as well as ephemera from short-lived dorm-based WDUK. More recent items include show flyers from currently operating station WXDU.

Additionally, contributions to the Vanishing Culture GoFundMe campaign allowed our scanning team to digitize college radio collections from the archives at Amherst College, Middlebury College, and The College of William & Mary. With materials from stations dating back to the 1940s and 1950s, these collections contain documentation that paints a picture of the ever-changing student radio scene. Handmade posters, DJ manuals, correspondence, program guides, studio notebooks (with scribbled comments written by DJs) and scrapbooks are rich sources of information about the management and activities of each station, as well as offering a look at how stations interacted with each other.

The DLARC College Radio collection can be viewed at archive.org/details/collegeradio. Materials from college-based amateur radio stations can be found within the collection at archive.org/details/collegiate-amateur-radio.

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 [email protected]. Questions about the college radio sub-collections can be directed to Jennifer Waits at [email protected].