Many readers may not be aware that the Audio division of the FCC Media Bureau maintains a very useful archive of FCC annual reports and other historic documents at this link. It covers FCC annual reports from 1935 to 1998 and reports of the predecessor Federal Radio Commission from 1927 to 1933. Under Congressional mandate, the format of the annual reports changed in 1999 and the new format has much less archival value although with the Internet more recent data is easier to find than it is for data from the 1950s. The new "annual performance reports" can be found here along with recent budgets.

The old FCC annual reports at the site are in .PDF format while the FRC reports use .JPG or .GIF images. This archive is not a key priority so little effort is spend on maintaining it.

There is another archive here that deals mostly with broadcasting issues but also includes historic tidbits like "FCC Order No. 1" describing the organization of FCC in 1934 and the original text of the Communications Act. This second archive is poorly indexed, but fascinating for academics and other researchers.

The archive is missing copies of FCC annual reports from 1966 - 1994.

While paper copies exist somewhere in FCC and they could conceptually be scanned into .pdf format, the current and pending low resource level at FCC make this a very low priority. However, contacts in the Commission indicate that they would be glad to add .pdf's of the missing annual reports to the archive for access by all if someone can provide them. Even a few would be nice.

So are there readers out there who can provide some of these missing FCC annual reports in .pdf or some other convenient format? Feel free to contact your blogger here.

Tags: FCC history