Preserving History Online November 19th, 2009
Tom Amontree

When we think of historic preservation, images of the physical world come to mind – the Sistine Chapel…a pre-Revolutionary home…an ancient text.  But broadband has brought a new genre of preservation to life, taking audio, visual, and written communications into the digital age.

Just this week, the online recording archive WolfgangsVault.com will begin posting free streams of 1,000 to 1,200 individual performances from the Newport Jazz Festival.  The $5 million dollar music preservation project has successfully recovered live performances dating back to at least 1955.  For the music lover, Wolfgang’s Vault unearths a treasure trove of jazz legends from Count Basie to Thelonious Monk, and many more.  In addition to the goal of preservation, the project is a love letter to the Newport Jazz Festival, which has faced challenging times in recent years, raising questions about the festival’s future.  But, thanks to broadband, these historic tracks will live on online.

And, speaking of online, have you ever wondered what happens when websites with a historic context disappear?  The Library of Congress’s Digital Preservation Program is intent on saving this kind of content, and has built a preservation network of over 130 partners nationwide to serve as stewards of this information.  Through digitalpreservation.gov, Americans nationwide can search archives of historic web pages, including national elections, 9/11, and more.  The site also features extensive digital collections dedicated to everything from historic newspapers, prints and photographs to veterans’ history and American culture.  Even local libraries are starting to adopt digital preservation – from digitizing and uploading old high school yearbooks to scanning old images and texts.

Broadband is proving to be a powerful resource for preservation, as well as an easy way of sharing these artifacts with the world.  Lucky for us, relics of our past that might otherwise vanish forever can now be enjoyed online.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 1:47 pm and is filed under Technologies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.