Pieces of Cornell's broadcasting history, including transcripts of the first news reports of the April 1969 Willard Straight Hall takeover, will become part of the archives in Cornell University Library, available to scholars and the public.

Radio station WVBR-FM is donating station files dating from the late 1950s to 2001 to the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, housed in Kroch Library. The donation will be celebrated Oct. 4 at 9:30 a.m. in 222 Robert Purcell Community Center.

Many of the materials will be on display at the event, which is open to the public and held in conjunction with an annual symposium with WVBR alumni discussing the future of broadcasting.

Materials being donated include hundreds of transcripts, on-air scripts and operational records, some of them documenting notable alumni when they were students, including MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann '79; Jon Rubinstein '78, M.Eng. '79, executive chairman of the board of Palm Inc., who also helped develop the iPod for Apple Computer; Tom Poleman '86, senior vice president of programming and marketing for Clear Channel's New York stations; and journalist John Hanrahan, a correspondent for WTTG in Washington, D.C.

"These are people who have become titans in the industry," said Mike Beyman, WVBR vice president for public relations.

Historic news scripts from the Willard Straight Hall takeover, including the announcement that students had armed themselves, are being donated by Gary Kaye '70, who is also donating other WVBR-related materials from his undergraduate years. There are photographs of Kaye interviewing Big Red hockey star Ken Dryden '69, before his storied NHL career with the Montreal Canadiens; Dryden now serves on the Canadian Parliament.

"Gary Kaye initiated this entire alumni project," Beyman said. The station had three " very densely packed filing cabinets" full of records from the past 50 years, he added. Up to 20 boxes of materials will be donated to the library.

"Right now, everything is saved on computer, so we delete almost nothing," Beyman said. "Back then, it depended on who kept the records."

Kaye, WVBR alumni and executive board members, and library representatives will attend the Oct. 4 event. "It's going to be a discovery experience for everybody there," Beyman said.

"We've found letters from Keith Olbermann to the Associated Press and the Ithaca community regarding some sports stories, " he said. "The earliest [document] we've found so far is a letter to someone in facilities from 1958, asking Cornell to put a transmitter tower on top of a building on the Engineering Quad."