Happy College Radio Day! Explore Student Radio’s Past and Present in the DLARC College Radio Collection
The 15th annual World College
Radio Day takes place on Friday, October 3, 2025, with stations from around the globe celebrating and bringing attention to student radio as an enduring form of media. The first licensed college radio stations launched in the United States in the 1920s and since that time student radio practitioners have been innovators in technology, music discovery and radio programming.
By nature, radio has traditionally
been an ephemeral endeavor, with many shows our blog never recorded and lost to the ages. While some stations meticulously save paper materials like internal newsletters and promotional materials sent by bands and record labels, many others regularly purge these bits and pieces of day-to-day operations. College radio has added challenges due to ever-changing groups of students, tight budgets and space constraints. In light of these factors, many college radio stations aren’t able to save and archive as much as they would like.
Spring 1988 DJ Comment book
from Mount Holyoke College’s radio station WMHC. Source: DLARC College Radio (digitized from the Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections Repository)
The Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications launched a dedicated college radio collection in February 2024 in an effort to preserve the materials associated with college radio culture. It now contains over 9,000 items from student radio stations and student radio trade organizations from across the United States and Canada. The wide-ranging collection includes radio station flyers, music charts, playlists, zines, program guides, organizational documents, correspondence, meeting notes, recordings of artist interviews, oral histories, scholarly articles, clippings, photos, training manuals, scripts, magazines and more. It is especially exciting to me that these items now exist in a central place online, so that college radio fans, participants, scholars and alumni can search and find materials from a variety of stations.