Archives,Advocacy and Crowd-Sourcing: Towards a More Complete Historiography of College Radio

Student-run radio stations at colleges and universities have thrived for nearly a century, yet their stories have been largely excluded from broadcast histories outside the commonly cited and overly simplified “college radio” era in the 1980s. Offering a more accurate definition of college radio, this article demonstrates the need for broader methodologies to contextualize its history, and advocates for the preservation of unique materials containing the voices of generations of young broadcasters. Audiovisual archivists, scholars, and members of the college radio community must engage in collaborative, interdisciplinary efforts in order to save these materials and make them accessible for research.