Date: December 2021
Amount: $889,405

With this grant, the Internet Archive will build the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications (DLARC): an online, open-access resource that preserves the vital resources — past, present, and future — that document the history of amateur radio and communications. The DLARC will provide a key open-access educational resource, free to use for researchers, students, and the general public. It will also serve as a permanent archive for the preservation of the history of ARDC, its members, and key individuals and organizations involved in the broader amateur radio movement. The DLARC will be both an education program building a unique and unparalleled collection of primary and secondary resources, but also an innovative technical project that will build a digital library that combines both digitized print materials and born-digital content and whose curatorial focus is driven by archiving and providing unified access to both personal and organizational archival records. Building the DLARC thus includes three distinct areas of work:

• a large-scale scanning program that digitizes relevant print materials such as journals, monographs, books, physical ephemera, and other physical records from both institutions and individuals;
• a large-scale digital archiving initiative that seeks to curate, archive, and provide specialized access to “born-digital” materials, such as digital photos and audio-video, as well as websites and web-published material;
• a personal archiving campaign to ensure the preservation and future access of notable individuals and stakeholders involved in the founding and activities of ARDC and the broader community.

Learn more at: archive.org.

Update

The creation of the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications (DLARC) is an overwhelming success. As a project of the Internet Archive (archive.org), DLARC has become the largest, and primary online library for “radio” material online. DLARC is accessible by anyone, anywhere, at no cost. DLARC is a particularly valuable resource for prospective and experienced Amateur Radio operators, radio and electronics hobbyists, students, and researchers.

This one accolade is representative of the overwhelmingly positive feedback that has been received about the creation of DLARC:

“[DLARC] is one of the key spots for getting good information in the real world of ham radio, and I find it very easy to navigate. You have my full endorsement.” – Gordon West, WB6NOA

At the conclusion of the grant period (EOY 2024), some statistics are:

• Two million files totaling 16.7 TB of data storage,
• 2.5 million (paper) pages were scanned,
• 7,461 audio items (including podcasts, radio shows, etc.),
• 9,004 video items (such as conference recordings and mirrored YouTube videos)

Many obscure, long out of print magazines, books, software, conference notes, club newsletters, and other media formats have been made available online for the first time in DLARC. Because of the resources and expertise available from Internet Archive, two large caches of material, requiring travel and shipping thousands of pounds of material, were rescued and made available in DLARC.

One of the primary advantages of DLARC and Internet Archive is that all material is digitally accessible for searching. For example, all issues of 73 Magazine were acquired, digitized, and incorporated into DLARC. One can specify a keyword, such as an individual callsign, and find every instance of that callsign in 73 Magazine, or anywhere in the materials in DLARC. In October 2023, Kay Savetz K6KJN (Internet Archive’s Program Manager, Special Collections) began a monthly column about the progress of DLARC – https://ia600404.us.archive.org/14/items/dlarc-whats-new-2024/What%27s%20New%20at%20DLARC%202024.pdf (compiled through December 2024) that details the progress of growing DLARC.

Unlike many Amateur Radio projects, DLARC, and the material within it, will remain available to everyone, worldwide, online, in perpetuity.

In April, 2025, Internet Archive received a second ARDC grant – https://www.ardc.net/apply/grants/2025-grants/grant-expanding-the-digital-library-of-amateur-radio-communications/ to continue the work begun in the first grant to acquire and digitize more Amateur Radio and communications material discovered, and to promote DLARC more widely, and make DLARC’s vast amount of material even more accessible and easy to use.