Imagine a football stadium that was so technologically game-changing that it became the model for all future sporting venues ever built. Until it was suddenly abandoned 15 years ago. As part of our series Preservation Battle, we look at significant buildings on the brink of demise—where you’ve been able to find Houston’s Astrodome for quite some time.
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An emerging maker culture building Cincinnati, a "Green Line" making a Mexican city healthier, and a car-free festival changing L.A.—all that, plus preserving post offices in an age of email and three plans to save San Francisco from a housing crisis, in this week’s Urban Reads.
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Yesterday, a huge fire destroyed the Internet Archive’s San Francisco scanning center, which digitally preserves all manner of books, films and microfilms for future use.
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Why is it so hard for us humans to let go? We’re obsessed with preserving the things we love—even when logic tells us it’s time to move on. One large scale example of this irrational behavior: The billions of dollars spent to move entire towns out of harm’s way.
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Beginning in March 2014, the two government-owned zoos in Costa Rica will be closed. The country is known for prioritizing environmental conservation, and zoo closures are a major step that animal rights and environmental advocates have been supporting worldwide for years. And Costa Rica really doesn’t need artificial diversity given that the country houses 500,000 species of organisms, or four percent of all known species.
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Did you know that the US government’s third-largest agency is ramping up a 20-year, $4.5 billion construction project that will turn the grounds of a former mental hospital into an "elaborate" headquarters for its sprawling network of agencies? It’s already a decade behind schedule and $1 billion over budget.
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Historic audio recordings aren’t exactly easy to access and play back since they’re often in obscure or aging formats and sit within giant repositories and private collections, but the Library of Congress is gearing up to help change that for researchers and the average joe. The outfit’s freshly announced National Recording Preservation Plan is headlined by a recommendation to create a publicly accessible national directory of sound recordings that’ll act as an “authoritative discography” with details regarding their production and where copies are housed. You’ll still have to take a trip to a library to hear the recordings for the time being, but the Library of Congress is hoping to hammer out licensing agreements that would allow for online streaming. Developing new preservation standards and creating university-based degree programs for audio archiving are also among the 32 short- and long-term recommendations spelled out by the document. Click the second source link to peruse the paper yourself.
[Image credit: Ray Tsang, Flickr]
Via: Huffington Post
Source: Library of Congress, Council on Library and Information Resources
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