A lot of organizations might do something special on their 25th or 50th year, but for Mary Beth Ross celebrating WUOG’s 35th anniversary meant getting a formal take on the radio station’s history.

In that spirit, the University radio station has created an audio documentary of its history by interviewing alumni and getting their stories from when they were employees.

“I think just to take the initiative and get the ball rolling with an idea like this will make it possible for others to add on and make their own in five or 10 year increments,” said Ross, news director of WUOG.

“We have a lot of people who have done a lot of great things here at WUOG, so we’re trying to harness that and create a collective experience,” she said.

Ross e-mailed several hundred alumni dating from 1970 to 2002, and many of them were eager to help.

“The main thing that we’re seeing from all the interviews is how much the alumni still appreciate WUOG, because it was a family for them,” she said. “The camaraderie that they felt here was something that they didn’t get anywhere else at the University.”

The schedule for this weekend’s birthday celebration includes a free show at the 40 Watt Club Saturday night and a program on Sunday featuring different concerts and in-studio recordings during the 80s and early 90s from the in-progress WUOG archive.

“We’ve had more than 2,000 of these recordings just sitting around our station for the past 35 years,” said Erika Frank, WUOG’s general manager. “This year, we took them all to the library’s archiving department.”

Mary Miller, the Peabody archivist assisting WUOG, said with several hundred hours of audio to archive it could take more than a year to complete.

“The transfers all take place in real time, so if we have a one-hour program, it takes an hour for it to transfer over and longer than that if any corrections need to be made,” Miller said.

Sunday’s panel discussion will address the importance of archiving from the library’s perspective, and former staffers and others from the local music scene will talk about how it affects Athens music history.