A little background…
For years, CKUT staff and volunteers squirrelled away cassette tapes, reel to reel tapes, MiniDiscs, CDs, posters, flyers, documents, and just about anything that felt important to preserve. In 2020-2021, with the station closed for Covid precautions, we had some extra time to root around in our many attics and crawlspaces to dig up these relics from their many hiding places.
We found everything from funny internal newsletters (never intended to see the light of day) to bracing coverage of the very real challenges faced by our communities over the decades.
One thing led to another and in 2022 we ended up receiving a grant from Library and Archives Canada to hire an archivist and an assistant to catalogue and begin properly archiving all of these hidden gems. A major point of this grant – which was written as preserving 80s and 90s counter-culture – was for us to make accessible all of the materials to the public and not lock them away behind an institutional archive.
We want people from the communities who created these materials to have access to them – not just to learn from them but hopefully to create new work from these now historical documents.
The archives crew at work in 2022
While CKUT’s website is now capable of archiving every radio show… forever… (check out a history of our website projects here), prior to November 2020, our site only stored about 3-6 months of archives at a time.
The result of this (plus the fact that much of our history was pre-internet audio archives) is that our audio archives from 35+ years of 24/7 broadcasting is not at all complete, but how could it be?
Over the years CKUT staffer Louise Burns started organizing the CKUT Time Capsule blog and the amazing Time Capsule ‘zine, which are both great places to find creative projects that were made with our archival material (like this) – or contemporary interviews with CKUT characters from years past.
Audio…
In the inventory sheet below you’ll find audio from a variety of sources – some preserved by accident on a forgotten hard drive or cassette tape – covering a wide range of topics. This sheet was expanded upon from what looked like a mid-2000’s archive inventory and contains some entries that we could not find the audio for. But everything in green, we have the files for.
The links and files are all set for public access – feel free to share.
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CKUT Audio Archive Inventory – this is our master document containing information and links for our entire audio archives from 1987-2020.
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If you are looking for programming from 2021 onwards, you can find all of that stored here.
Some of these audio clips from the inventory sheet have ended up in our:
Below are some highlights from our archives (check the audio archive inventory sheet for more info about what is contained in these recordings). These are the kinds of things that we are hoping to make some new projects from:
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Native Solidarity News
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Black Talk
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Coverage of the AIDS crisis
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Coverage of the Kanesatake Resistance
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Dykes on Mykes
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Interviews with Musicians
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Free City Radio – Stefan Chrisoff’s MiniDisc Collection
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CKUT Station IDs
* If you are interested in helping out with our Music Department as they digitize 80’s and 90’s DIY cassettes in our collection, please write music@ckut.ca
Visual…
We’ve already gone thru and published some of the easy to categorize visual stuff:
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A History of CKUT Program Guides
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A History of KRAK – late ’80s publication
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A History of Statik – 90’s and beyond
But there is a lot of raw material still (and we have boxes of papers that we are slowly scanning in late 2024, early 2025):
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CKUT Flat Files (master folder for all visual elements)
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Station branding and design elements (this will be expanded shortly)
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CKUT showfiles (the contents of a filing cabinet in the spoken word office, containing documents relating to different CKUT programs)
We will continue to expand this guide as we acquire more archives. Please reach out to production@ckut.ca if you have any questions, want to get involved as a volunteer, or would like to contribute your own recordings/documents to our archive.