KRAB-FM, A case study in archiving and digital entropy I have mentioned in a previous phlog post about a podcast I occasionally listen to called "Radio Survivor" (www.radiosurvivor.com). An episode I was listening to recently is about KRAB-FM, a radio station in Seattle which was on the commercial portion of the FM spectrum but was non-commercial, listener supported. They were on the air from 1962 until 1984. Radio Survivor Podcast hasn't put out an episode in nearly a year at this point so it's probably safe to assume this podcast is now defunct, "defunct" is going to be a reoccurring theme throughout this post. This episode (https://www.radiosurvivor.com/2016/11/online-archive-fourth-community -radio-station-krab/) was an interview with Chuck Reinsch, a man who worked at KRAB throughout most of the station's life and his attempt to archive everything he could about the station including recordings, newsletters, fliers, program guides, etc... Listening to this podcast, I was interested and clicked on the link (www.krabarchive.com) only to find that this archive was also now defunct (dead link). I also found another URL (www.krab.fm) but this is also a dead link at this time, they probably both pointed to the same server. Throughout the interview Mr. Reinsch kept mentioning that he felt a sense of urgency ... that it was imperative that he digitize and archive everything as quickly as possible. I am not sure if Chuck died recently or not. I was able to find an obit for a Chuck Reinsch but I can't confirm it's the same man. I am only now beginning to dig into the content thanks to the internet archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20260113031926/http://krabarchive.com/ I am saddened by the fact that this man put so much effort and love into trying to preserve the essence of this station and build this site and collect all this content only to have it turn into a dead link between the time the podcast was recorded and when I listened to it (okay that's a 10 year gap but still...). Thank you Brewster Kahle for the internet archive. But I wonder what will become of the archive after Kahle's passing? Has he set up a trust to ensure the archive will continue to get funded or will it end up like the Computer History Museum in Seattle which Paul Allen was funding until he died, wherein his family quickly saw dollar signs and sold off the contents of the museum and shut it down. If it wasn't for SDF and their efforts (https://sdf.org/?ssh) we'd have nothing left of this museum. A fate easily avoided if Paul had taken 10 minutes to call up his lawyers and ask them to set up a trust for the museum. Since krabarchive.com is not resolving I thought maybe the domain name would be available, I could register it, and using the Internet Archive's latest snapshot restore it. But no, the domain name is still registered, and will probably be auto-renewed until whatever bank account it's tied to gets drained or shut down. The domain krab.fm is available but at a cost of around $87 a year. The good news is that the Internet Archive's wayback machine did a great job of grabbing this site. Sometimes it just does a shallow grab and you get the page but not the media or you get the home page and maybe pages which are one or two levels deep but the more you dig the less you find. So far it looks pretty complete and you can listen to the audio and view the images of documents etc... The bad news is that it's not easily going to be discovered. If it turns up on a web search you're going to get one of the defunct URLs and only a small subset of those visitors will know they can go to the wayback machine to get the archive of the archive (Internet Archive's archive of the KRAB archive). Also web search engines will eventually prune results which have dead links. Chuck Reinsch may have put some of this content elsewhere on the Internet Archive, he did discuss wanting to do that during the podcast interview. However this sounded like a "phase 2" plan for him as he was more focused on digitizing and creating his own site. I think it's great what he did. I love the Internet Archive but it is *one* site, a single point of failure. Many small archives in addition to aggregate archives like the IA is the way to go. Plus he put a fair bit of work into the layout of the pages, not that it's going to win any awards for web design but it's a site fit for exploration and feels a lot like a late 90's or early 00's page. On the IA, generally, you can dump the content and hopefully if you include enough metadata it's all find-able, but there is the personal touches of the page layout. It's like the difference between a warehouse full of shelved media and a museum designed to have people wandering through, exploring, and taking a trip down (someone else's) memory lane. I guess the least I can do for the preservation of the KRAB archive, at least this morning, is write a phlog about it and maybe you will go to the IA's Wayback Machine and explore the site Chuck poured his heart and soul into before it silently evaporated like much of the web. https://web.archive.org/web/20260113031926/http://krabarchive.com/ p.s. I am getting close to completing my MP3 conversion of, what I call, "Yesterday's Tomorrow". This is some of the content which is currently available on town.hall.org. I am converting these four shows: Geek of the Week, Tech Nation, Communications Revolution, and Computers, Freedom, and Privacy (which is actually a collection of talks that took place during a conference). These are currently available on this gopher server but once I'm done converting the remaining episodes of Geek of the Week and Tech Nation then I plan on uploading my MP3 files to the Internet Archive and hosting a Yesterday's Tomorrow Podcast RSS feed somewhere on the web which will point to the mp3 files on the Internet Archive so that you can listen to them with your favorite podcasting app. For myself, I use AntennaPod on Android, but anything that can subscribe to an RSS feed will work. I just don't want to start that until I'm done with the conversion because it'll be a lot easier to convert the links in the XML file all at once rather than duplicating effort (putting it up on my gopher server and making it available on my LAN for my own podcast listening enjoyment, plus putting it on the IA). If I had to do it all over again I'd just do it on IA and make it public from the beginning but at this point it seems easier to keep going and then do the conversion afterwards. Anyway, stay tuned. There is a lot of very interesting content in those old recordings and it'll be nice to make it available in a modern context (mp3 files not au files and podcast-app-playable). .