March 29, 2024

This Week in Amateur Radio

North America's Premiere Amateur Radio News Magazine

The Internet Archive Wants Your Help Building Its Collection of Amateur Radio Material

As much as some companies like Google are willing to let their cloud-based game services like Stadia perish on the vine, groups working to preserve digital information are only growing more sophisticated. On Monday, the nonprofit Internet Archive said they’re working with a grant to create a monster library of amateur audio broadcasts and early digital publications.

In the nonprofit’s blog post announcing the initiative, The Internet Archive said this Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications, even though its name is a real mouthful and is centered on the history of early ham radio, will also contain digitized print copies as well as digital-first material populated on the early internet. That will include old digital photos, websites, videos, podcasts, and more, according to the announcement.

Kay Savetz, a tech historian and lead on the Archive’s new project, told Gizmodo in a phone interview that he has the flexibility to include practically any digital communication from the early days of computing in the 1970s up through the ‘90s. This could include old videos posted to YouTube or digital newsletters that are no longer available. He said early podcasts that were once available but have since been lost to time by servers or hosts going defunct are especially of interest to the archival project.

The archivist said that in terms of the internet, people created code for their servers and clients but as so often happens, old websites get forgotten or become obsolete. Their focus is on preservation, and he said they even have the capability to play some old defunct Flash animations using the emulator called Ruffle to regain some of the old lost content from the days of Newgrounds and other early content hosting sites.

“With stuff like video games, businesses, in particular, their job is to create content as quickly as possible, push it out there,” Savetz said. “They’re not thinking of preservation, and they don’t really care if it disappears off the app store 10 years from now.”

Read more – Gizmodo: https://bit.ly/3yjFZf0