Chapter 4: Radio as Collage Art

The WFHB Community Archive

My experience with the Vrabely Collection and the ATM as a whole served me well in the summer of 2024, when my dissertation research led me to working with archival materials related to WFHB, where there have long been boxes full of physical media stashed on lofts and shelves: several hundred cassettes and MiniDiscs, a few dozen DATs (Digital Audio Tapes), countless paper documents, and even a few reel-to-reel tapes. The station’s digital archives, stored and backed up on various servers, are even larger in terms of how much information they store and growing quickly. At any given time, the WFHB website houses a good amount of content produced in-house, but due to site space constraints, audio files are regularly removed from this public access after a few years, leaving behind traces in the form of posts describing the content once available there. The audio remains in digital storage on WFHB’s internal servers (and backup servers). Recently, station personnel have begun standardizing practices and locations more completely, meaning that there is a central location that personnel can access once staff give them access to do so. The station has a far greater capacity to retain materials on these internal servers.

I learned more about the extent of our physical collections of archival media by chance. In May 2024, Jeremy Reed, then in the last stages of his own dissertation (2025) at Indiana University’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, reached out to Jar and then to me to ask if the station might have any undigitized materials he could borrow for a community archive project he was working on related to the Lotus World Music Festival. We all met at the station one Friday afternoon in early June. Jar and then-station operations manager Josh Brewer carefully brought the physical materials they had found down to ground level (Figure 4.1), where we then sorted through and separated a subset of media that were labeled in such ways as to seem pertinent to the Lotus project.

Figure 4.1: Josh Brewer passes down boxes of old media to Jar Turner (on ladder) in the WFHB music library.

Once we were satisfied that we had located most of what would be useful to Jeremy (Figure 4.2), Josh and I continued to sort through the rest of the physical media, loosely organizing them into categories based on external information, generally inscribed on cases and labels or, when wholly unavailable in written format, guessed based on physical proximity to other items (Figure 4.3). Modeling my process after what I learned working at the ATM, I built a spreadsheet to update with all the information we could find on each piece and digitized the cassettes in MP3 format—not the archival standard, but enough to give us something to keep on our servers as facsimiles of historical documents.

Figure 4.2: DATs, cassettes, MiniDiscs, and open-reel recordings about Lotus Fest.

Figure 4.3: Me, taking inventory of sorted media on the floor of the WFHB music library. Photo by Abby Noroozi.

A far more experienced archivist than I, Josh began a larger WFHB archive project around this same time, reaching out generally to WFHB and asking them to contribute any materials and recordings they were willing to make accessible to station personnel (and, potentially, a wider audience later on). Josh devised naming and metadata protocol to keep everything in order. The WFHB community archive thus took on a shape informed by formal archival practices. None of the individual archivists, however, had full say over what belonged in the archive. From solicited participant donations, an assemblage emerged of local music, local news, and topics that station personnel had felt were relevant enough to the local South-Central Indiana community to warrant recording and often airing.

The Vrabely Collection and the WFHB archives are both complex systems of knowledge production with different affordances that follow from their organizational frameworks. Though the former has more overtly “formal” characteristics and the latter more in common with a prototypical community or DIY archive, both overlap these imagined spheres, and thus they should not be understood as being neatly divided into a formal and a community archive. There are other possibilities to consider, as well. In the case of WFHB, a combination of formal training, minimal resources, and broad community participation calls to mind Catherine Mullen’s discussion of the possibilities for a DIY (do-it-yourself) ethos in archiving. She writes that DIY-oriented archives “align closely with the concept of community archives, while at the same time introducing a more radical approach to community practice and democratization” (2022, 42). In guiding WFHB’s archiving processes, Josh took seriously volunteer input, encouraging them to contribute anything they felt was worthwhile and offering the most thoughtful framework possible given the limited resources available to him through the station. While paid staff were involved in disseminating information to volunteers on how to contribute to the archives, their roles were ultimately to facilitate rather than gatekeep archive access. Contrasted with the hegemonies inherent in the official archives Derrida discusses, this ability for any volunteer to shape what imaginaries are preserved comes across as potentially radical indeed. I continue exploring archival possibilities for diverse knowledge production in the next two sections, which focus on the spatiotemporal aspects of the items that comprise a given archive.