Internet Archive Seeks Material for Library of Amateur Radio and Communications

[savetz]

Internet Archive has begun gathering content for the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications (DLARC), which will be a massive online library of materials and collections related to amateur radio and early digital communications.

The DLARC project is looking for contributors with troves of ham radio, amateur radio, and early digital communications related books, magazines, documents, catalogs, manuals, videos, software, personal archives, and other historical records collections, no matter how big or small. In addition to physical material to digitize, we are looking for podcasts, newsletters, video channels, and other digital content that can enrich the DLARC collections.

[curiousfab]

This is a mammoth task but an important one. I wonder if there's a way to collaborate with existing collections of historical Amateur radio data, such as the famous "QSL Collection" from Vienna: https://www.dokufunk.org/index.php?lang=EN

I think they have more material than probably anyone else in the world, but much of it is "offline" (partly digitized but not web accessible).

Another huge collection of historic QSL cards, bios of deceased radio amateurs and other stuff: http://hamgallery.com/

[jimnotgym]

> software

Amatuer radio seems full of little software tools to do calculations that are closed source. I hope the authors can be encouraged to publish source, or it will die with them.

[bityard]

They are in luck, then, because hams are famous for never throwing anything out, ask me how I know.

[nidnogg]

Does it have to be strictly historical radio content? I have a radio app I used to showcase some of my compositions but I'm not sure it'd qualify.

[bretbernhoft]

Outstanding context, thank you!

This is a wonderful partnership to learn about. I hope that Internet Archive is successful here.

[altilunium]

Onno W. Purbo hosted his own Amateur Radio personal wiki [1]. He's also uploaded his talks on Youtube [2].

[1] https://lms.onnocenter.or.id/wiki/index.php?search=Amatir&ti...

[2] https://youtube.com/c/OnnoCenter

[JKCalhoun]

I have been loving this site for old radio/electronics magazines:

https://worldradiohistory.com/

I would assume archive.org would just ask permission to hoover (mirror) it.

[thrdbndndn]

Probably totally digress, but I wish IA can organize their digital library slightly better.

One day I was checking some manga books by ISBN on IA just out of curiosity. And for some reason, it put the ISBNs for all the volumes of a manga into one single entry (https://archive.org/details/isbn_1919979003907, check "ISBN" metadata section) and unsurprisingly, the actual content is only one volume, vol.43 (not even vol.1!). I have a feeling other volumes may exist somewhere there, but there is no way to search for them.

This isn't a one-off occurrence either, it reflects my experience for trying to find specific item there well, especially for non-English books.

[textfiles]

On a given day I'm moving tens of thousands of items around to make them easier to find. I'm sure I'll get to your section sooner or later.

[giantrobot]

A lot of the time the metadata accuracy is up to the original uploader. IA's upload system doesn't magically fill in all the metadata details for an item.

[mdp2021]

While I also wish the Archive to be more precise - e.g. in the "Author" and in the "Year of publication" fields -,

I suggest that you check their RSS feeds to see how staggeringly high the rate of uploads is. That uploading is "frenetic" (in a good way of course) reveals where the focus is. For re-assessing and fixing the records a parallel team would probably be needed.

I would gladly help towards that: I never checked but maybe one can volunteer.

[JKCalhoun]

I agree. I had wondered how successful and easy it would be to create a "front end" site that does a better job of searching, organizing archive.org.

[cratermoon]

How about these, not mine personally, but one's I'm aware of.

- http://c2.com/morse/

- http://c2.com/~ward/morse/

- History of W9YB http://c2.com/w4/yb/ (Purdue Amateur Radio Club)

[EamonnMR]

http://www.ominous-valve.com/shortwve.html

Some quality stuff there.

[Johnythree]

Sadly, the .RA files are missing from that site.

However you can download the broken file, (eg "lpl.ra")

open it with a text editor, and extract the URL (eg http://home.att.net/~philys.la/lpl.ra)

And put that into the Internet Archive.

[resters]

There are millions of "reflector" messages that contain a tremendous amount of knowledge. I hope the project manages to archive those as well.

[zeckalpha]

I have a shelf full of books (already got rid of all my QSTs I can access digitally) I will be able to get rid of soon!

[amatecha]

Ahh, this is great. I was already seriously impressed by the amount of amateur radio content on the Internet Archive. I'm happily surprised to see some solicitation for even more content! Passing this along to my relevant communities/clubs/etc. (also just emailed one possible place to archive :))

[biggieshellz]

Do QSL cards count?

[savetz]

YES. -Kay

[PM_me_your_math]

Might be difficult to beat the ARRL's library in terms of depth.

[ricktdotorg]

a collab between IA and the ARRL would be ideal! but i feel the two institutions may not see eye to eye.

[mostertoaster]

It would be awesome if one day we go back and hear all these small town and college radio stations and the types of shows in them.

Woukd be a cool time capsule.

[wrayjustin]

I didn't see this mentioned, but is there an interest for record transmissions?

[GekkePrutser]

Oh nice effort. I certainly have some stuff to contribute.

[Gigachad]

The IA has really lost its reputation as an archive by choosing to remove content down for political purposes. They see themselves as publishers rather than an archive.

[cormorant]

I attempted to google to guess what you meant.

I found: (1) they recently removed KiwiFarms; (2) in 2020, they began labeling certain pages with "fact checks"; (3) they remove content by request of the site owner or by copyright complaint.

Of those, (2) seems the most political, but it's not removing content. Was there something else you had in mind?

[NavinF]

What did they remove?

[muppetman]

As far as I'm concerned the IA can stick this up their arse. They REFUSE to acknowlege my request to have a personal website that they've managed to archive removed. It's a person blog that I want online so I can give the URL to family and friends, but I keep it out of Google etc with robots.txt. But once during an upgrade of the backend software I stuffed up the robots.txt and they crawled it until I fixed it up.

Will they reply to my emails? They will not. I'm so frustrated, they just IGNORE emails.

Don't support these clowns.

[giantrobot]

You picked the dumbest possible method to share something privately with family and friends but it's the Internet Archive's issue to fix? A robots.txt provides zero protection for a public website.

[mdp2021]

> they just ignore

I have hints that they may be understaffed. If you had a little spare time, you could lend a hand to their legendary effort, and maybe contribute in fixing a few things such as your issue.

[throwaway742]

https://iphqs.com/dmca-takedown-notice-generator/

[199X]

I suggest you publishing something againts their political agenda, and they will remove and censor it asap