In this edition of the Voices of the Past Netcast, we meet Kaitlin O’Shea. Kaitlin is the creator of the Preservation in Pink blog and newsletter. She will explain how the iconic pink flamingo, and a group of bloggy friends, have helped her find her voice to take the conversation about historic preservation to a wider audience. Also features posts: Exploring Archaeology on the Social Web and Shawn Graham of the Electric Archaeology blog.

Transcript Intro: Coming up in this edition of the Voices of the Past Netcast, we’ll meet Dale Jarvis. Dale is a folklorist and storyteller who is pioneering ways to share his art with new generations using online media. He experiments with traditional storytelling methods using social tools like Twitter, Facebook, podcasts and even Second Life. He’ll talk about the timelessness of storytelling and how you can still communicate the power of place through the web.

Thanks for joining us. I’m Jeff Guin. We’ll have that interview in a moment. First, here are a couple of briefs about the heritage world online.

E-Conservation Magazine

An online magazine dedicated to conservation science is welcoming a new feature. E-Conservation is now featuring a regular column by conservator and blogger Daniel Cull. Dan tells us his articles will discuss conservation-related news and controversial issues.

[Dan Cull Soundbite]

E-conservation is an open-access magazine produced by and for the international conservation community. Issue 12 features the first edition of my regular column as a permanent collaborator. For our previous collaborations, we developed a good working relationship and I was delighted to accept this position. The column will cover topical, controversial or otherwise interesting topics in the field of conservation. My hope is that it will foster dialog that will in turn feed back into the magazine.

[Dan Cull Soundbite Ends]

According to its publishers, the objective of e-Conservation features news, events, and scientific articles from around the world. The magazine features items about conservation of detached mural paintings in Portugal and wood science for conservation of cultural heritage. In addition to the magazine, the e-Conservation website features internships and job opportunities, and an online forum.

You can learn more about Dan and his personal conservation blog by reading our interview with him at the Voices of the Past website as well.

E-mail Saves a Tree

Trees are among the least-understood historic features, often removed because of safety fears or to make way for new construction.

A 170-year-old tree is still standing thanks to the power of the internet. The osage-orange tree is the lone survivor of a hedgerow planted in Kewanee, Illinois circa 1840. The concept was promoted by Illinois College professor Jonathan Baldwin Turner and became the shelterbelt system saving America’s soils from the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Because of its significance, Illinois arborist Guy Sternberg mobilized his online contacts to preserve the tree.

Sternberg learned of the tree’s fate just days before its scheduled removal. Within a 48-hour period, the city received dozens of e-mails from arborists, forestry professors, and other professionals contributing their expert opinions and support. Others from across the country offered the city donations and technical assistance to help preserve the tree.

The campaign branched out into other forms of electronic communication as well, including blogs and podcasts. In the end, the efforts paid off and the tree was saved. If you would like to contribute to the tree’s continuing preservation, you can donate via its Facebook fan page.

Dale Jarvis, Folklorist/Storyteller

In a world that communicates 140 characters at a time, Dale Jarvis has found a way to keep the storytelling tradition alive. In fact, he’s broadening the world of storytelling through creative uses of web-based tools.

Dale is the Intangible Cultural Heritage development officer for Newfoundland, Canada. And when he’s not sharing ghost stories and legends with community groups, he might be found in Secondlife sharing stories around a virtual campfire. Or collaborating with others to tell stories on Twitter.

Here’s what Dale had to say about how he captures the essence of the oral tradition while adapting it to new media.

[Interview]

Dale Jarvis: As a storyteller, one thing that people ask me all the time is is storytelling dying. You know, is this a dying art? And I really believe that things are always in a constant state of evolution. I think traditions are always changing, and I think that the rise of things like YouTube indicate that people are really passionate about storytelling. They really want to share their own personal stories.

So, it is sort of a really great democratization of storytelling in a way. Maybe people don’t sit around and tell the long form fairy tales in quite the same way that they used to, but people are incredibly interested in sharing their own personal stories and creating stories and sharing them.

So I am fascinated by sites like YouTube because I think it does indicate that their is this human desire to share stories. That storytelling is something that is something that is really important to us as a species. Everyone wants to share their story in some way.

I think technologies, like cell phones, are something that we are going to see more and more get used for some of this stuff, especially like the iPhone. Especially with the GPS capabilities, and I mentioned before that I am real interested in place-based narratives, place-based storytelling. I think that we are going to see more and more of this type of stuff.

One of the projects I am involved with right now is a project that was started in Toronto called Murmur. The murmur project started off as an art project in downtown Toronto, where people collected local stories told by local people, they recorded those stories, they put them all online.

So there is a map of the neighborhood and you can go to the site and click on the little dot and listen to a person tell the story about that particular location. But then if you actually go to the street and walk down the street, there is a little sign on the street with a phone number and a six-digit code, so you can take your cell phone and dial the number, punch in the six-digit code and listen to the person tell their story on that spot.

And this a project that started in Toronto, it’s moved across Canada. There are now projects in South Pablo and Brazil, there’s projects in Scotland and Ireland, and we are starting up a similar project here in Newfoundland.

I think that that has great potential. That these sort of cell phone based stories and sort of using new technologies to get local stories and local traditions and local knowledge out to a wider public are going to be very, very popular.

I know places like the Appellation Trail and national historic sites in the United Kingdom are starting to experiment with GPS based narrative-type devices, so you can have your iPhone and walk around the site and listen to different types of stories. And I think we are going to see a lot more of that type of stuff happening more in the very, very near future.

Jeff Guin: Storytelling is evolving. There are different ways of telling a story now, and I actually noticed that one of the things you are involved with is using Twitter to tell a story. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Dale Jarvis: Yes, Twitter is one of these things that you have to sort of boil down to something to a very little short sort of thing.

So storytellers are sort of used to waxing poetic and telling these long stories. I can tell stories as a storyteller, you know, sort of those long fairy tales that take 30 minutes 45 minutes to tell, and I know storytellers who can tell one story that can last three hours.

So Twitter sort of forces you to rethink how you approach a story. I have told stories on Twitter. As part of a storytelling festival I was involved with, I actually told a long-form story just 100 characters at a time in over the course of a week.

So people could sort of follow my tweets and then read the whole story as I posted it. But I think that there is also the potential to use Twitter as well to share some tiny little stories.

There are some great little websites. There is one called Twistory, which is sort of one of these sites that collects all the things that people are putting as updates on Twitter and post them under different categories. So you can find everything someone hates or loves at a certain moment or what they believe in at a certain moment. And they are fascinating.

It is maybe not sort of narrative storytelling in the way that we think of it, but it is sort of a remarkable insight on into current moods and how people are perceiving their own little personal worlds.

[Interview Ends]

Now, Dale just published his first book about Ghostly Ballerinas. He was also involved in organizing the Place, Narrative and New Media conference, a half-day symposium on how new technologies are being incorporated into storytelling. We have links to Dale’s blog at our shownotes site. While you’re there, check out our extended audio podcast with Dale.

That’s it for this edition of the Voices of the Past netcast. Until next time, we’ll see you online.

Coming up in this edition of the Voices of the Past Netcast, we’ll meet Lisa Louise Cooke. Lisa created and maintains Genealogy Gems–one of the world’s most popular genealogy websites. She’ll tell us about the learning curve involved in using online media, and how she uses the web to create a deeper connection to her audience.

Thanks for joining us. I’m Jeff Guin. We’ll have that interview in a moment. First, here are a couple of briefs about heritage in the online world.

National Parks on Expedia

Expedia is partnering with the National Park Foundation on a new Web site to help travelers enjoy their trips to U.S. national parks a little more.

The site at includes downloadable park maps and other content from the National Park Foundation, as well as information about lodging options outside the parks.

The content also includes suggestions for long weekend itineraries with stops at national park sites in Colorado, Texas and Michigan, and a series of stories called “Can’t-Miss National Parks.” The first five parks featured in the “Can’t-Miss” series are the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Glacier, Olympic and Yosemite.

The timing of the Web site launch was designed to coincide with the airing of Ken Burns’ new documentary on public television, “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.”

Virtual Museum of Iraq

Italy is putting the Baghdad museum online.

The Virtual Museum of Iraq is designed to make some of the world’s most important artifacts accessible to everyone.

The site offers visitors the chance to walk through eight virtual halls and admire works from the prehistoric to the Islamic period, while videoclips reconstruct the history of the country’s main cities.

The site is available in Arabic, English and Italian.

Visitors can rotate some objects in the virtual museum to get an almost 360 degree view.

Italy contributed one million euros and provided expert staff to help restore the museum, creating a restoration laboratory in Baghdad and overhauling the museum’s Assyrian and Islamic galleries.

Present-day Iraq lies on the site of ancient Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the Baghdad museum boasts one of the best collections of ancient artfacts in the world.

Around 15,000 of the museum’s relics were carried off during a 48-hour looting spree in 2003 in the wake of the US invasion.

While around 6,000 works have been returned, many other pieces are still missing.

The Baghdad Museum Project is looking for international partners to help with its four-part plan to help save the museum. The program hopes to establish an online catalog to help locate the artifacts from the Baghdad museum.

It would also like to create collaborative workspace within the virtual Baghdad Museum, to allow international teams to work together.

Featured Voice of the Past: Lisa Louise Cooke
October is family history month in the U.S. And to celebrate, we’re featuring one of genealogy’s most prolific and beloved web personalities.

Lisa Louise Cooke has been passionate about family history since she was a child, looking at old family scrapbooks with her grandmother.  Since then, she’s turned that passion into a career.

She is the producer and host of the popular  Genealogy Gems Podcast, an audio and video genealogy show available in iTunes.

Additionally, she hosts the monthly Family Tree Magazine Podcast and videocasts for Family History Expos. I spoke to Lisa Louise Cooke recently, and here’s what she had to say about how she learned to use social media tools to promote genealogy.

Voices of the Past Episode 1: Transcript

Coming up in this edition of the Voices of the Past netcast, we’ll meet Dave Moyer. Moyer is a new media professional and a historic preservation activist. We’ll learn how he became involved in those efforts, and how he manages his role as founding president of Bitwire media … at just sixteen years old.

Welcome to Voices of the Past. I’m Jeff Guin. We’ll have that interview will be coming up for you in just a few moments. But first, here are a few briefs about heritage in the online world.

ONLINE HERITAGE RESEARCH CATALOG

The Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago is offering a wealth of downloadable research documents about the ancient Middle East at no cost. The material comes from the institute’s extensive collection which includes important academic books on the languages, history and cultures of the ancient Middle East.

The Oriental Institute first announced the Electronic Publications Initiative in 2004. The initiative’s mission is for all publications from the Oriental Institute to be published in print and electronically. The institute has published nearly 300 books since 1906. Topics range from dictionaries of the Assyrian and Hittite languages to oversized folio volumes that document Egyptian temples and tombs. Past volumes are being added online as funding permits.

Now, the Insititute says that the availability of free downloads has actually increased print sales by seven percent.

CONSERVATION WIKI

The American Institute for Conservation and its Foundation recently launched a collaborative wiki based on their conservation catalogs. The catalogs include descriptions of materials and techniques used to preserve and treat works of art and historic artifacts. These include topics such as books and paper, paintings, photographic materials, and textiles.

The site is based on the MediaWiki platform software that was designed for Wikipedia.org. This wiki will allow editors to work collaboratively to update the information. It will also ensure that innovative methods and materials are documented and widely disseminated to practicing conservators and conservation scientists.

The wiki was created with a grant from the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training.

HERITAGE VIDEO TRAVEL WEBSITE

For the past three years, Michael Phillips has had a dream that he hopes will someday spread to the rest of the world: to create usense of place with video. It seems the tech world has helped set the stage for that dream, incorporating video functionality into everything from mobile phones to music players. With his heritage travel site and blog, iGuidez, Phillips provides a template for capturing and sharing special sites for netizens everywhere to enjoy.

I recently spoke with Michael Phillips about his dream for the Voices of the Past podcast. Phillips talks about how he developed iGuidez and the challenges of running a heritage website. You can listen to his insights by visiting our shownotes site or by searching for us on iTunes.

FEATURED VOICE OF THE PAST: DAVE MOYER

While many sixteen year olds are obsessing about their next social event or prospects for college, one young man is taking a broader view. His name is Dave Moyer, and he is the founding president of Bitwire Media. Bitwire is a digital media content network that produces a variety of podcasts, websites and blogs featuring some of the world’s top new-media professionals.

But beyond his work as a prodigy in social media, he is also an active proponent of historic preservation. In fact, Moyer was one of the select few chosen across the country to work alongside First Lady Laura Bush in New Orleans during a summit with the History Channel and the Preserve America initiative. Since then, he has co-chaired three local and national summits promoting youth activism in historic preservation.

I had the opportunity to chat with Dave Moyer during a recent meeting of WordPress users. This is what he had to say about how he first became interested in podcasting, and the importance of teachers as heritage values advocates:

MOYER: I was lucky. In 7th grade, I went into the normal history class idea of “here we are, we are going to get the history textbooks an learn a bunch of facts and then forget them by the time its summer.”

I was ready for that. Then the first day, we learned primary sources. We learned Library of Congress, American Memory. We learned all of these places to get stuff, and I am like, “OK, this is a little different. What is this?”

By the spring we are asked by historic Denver because its teacher, Michelle Pierson is an incredible historic preservationist and educator at the same time. And she does both very well, and she gave us the opportunity to work with historic Denver on a project for the first annual Historic Colfax avenue marathon. And they said, “Alright, make us a brochure,” and we were like, “No, we are going to make a podcast.”

I just learned about podcasting, and so I came up and said, “Alright, what if we tried a podcast form?” And we posted…we recorded in conjunction with the Library of Congress’s teaching of primary sources, History Channel, a few other organizations. We recorded six podcasts on different areas of Colfax so that the runners could download these things onto their iPods and listen to them while they are running. So, we got within, probably the first couple of months over 100,000 downloads in the state of Colorado alone with these podcasts. We have gotten grants from Best Buy, the History Channel, it’s been national recognized as a program, and I have had the honor of being able to go down to New Orleans to work with First Lady Laura Bush on the first annual Preserve America Summit down there. I’ve worked with a bunch of other youth from the nation. I have co-chaired, I think there have been four now, of the regional Colorado Preserve America Youth Summits that have stemmed off of that as a separate endeavor. It’s been a great, great dream…it’s all snowballed. But it’s been awesome. I’ve had all those opportunities.

GUIN: So, you’ve been speaking at social media conferences, obviously, and you are here at WordCamp now. Have you added historic preservation conferences to your speaking schedule? Are you in demand yet as a speaker in those circles?

MOYER: There’s some of that. I’ve done, I came just recently, they had the state Preserve America Youth Summit, I talk about the Colorado Preserve America Summit and I work there, I’m speaking there, it is sort of a….. I do a couple things. I’ve done the National Trust for Historic Preservation, those kinds of things. Not as much as the social media, and that’s just kind of picked up as of late. But there are occasional times where I will go out there and be requested to talk about the student side of things and the tech side of things. Because that is what I live, that is what I do.

GUIN: So, do you find that sometimes maybe it’s a little harder when you’re dealing with people dealing with historic preservation that they seem a little distrustful or reticent with these technologies?

MOYER: Oh they do. There are all sorts of…well, a lot of historic preservationists are also the teachers, they are also the educators who have learned through their years and years of teaching that tech equals bad because it distracts kids in my classroom. So the cell phones have to be put away and taken away, and iPods have to be shoved in a box that they get back when its June. And really, there’s technologies…you can’t fight ‘em. They come out of the closet.. from under the table, I know that. What you need to do is take that and turn it into a tool so that it is actually being an educational thing. I keep going back to Michelle Piersen. We’ve done wikis, we’ve done blogs in her history class. There was a kid who did a Ben Franklin’s blog because he came to Denver for the Ben Franklin museum and was touring around and trying to fit into modern society. All kinds of great, great stuff, and when you are taking it out of the text book and…and textbook worksheets, they have a horrible negative connotation with kids, you get such a better connection when you connect it to something that we know. Back in the 1920s, kids read nonstop, that was their life. Either they read or they go play down in the park. Now we listen to our iPods or we go play down in the park. You have to adapt as the kids are adapting. You have to adapt as the work is adapting, and it’s hard sometimes for some of the preservationists and some of the people who are active in this stuff to do that. That’s what we are trying to work on a lot, is show them that this is kinda works.

GUIN: So, are you doing…you mentioned the original series of podcasts. Are you following those up in any kind of way? Do you have plans to do more work with either podcasts or other forms of social media related to heritage preservation?

MOYER: We recently did a big project with the local veterans museum for World War II veterans, and we did podcasts associated with that, actual interviews with some of the vets there. There are lots of things that are always being worked on. We’ve not been able to do as much as we’ve liked to because of different issues associated with the museum there, and just as we were talking about before, curators who are stuck in the days of “we need to have a wall, and we need to have the glass behind it” and that’s all we can do. And sometimes that creates a roadblock, but there’s always stuff in the works and there are many many plans in the future on this…

GUIN: Now, Dave actually hosts several podcasts, including the WordCast, The Aimless Agenda Show, and the Best of the Net. Additionally, he is one of the few recipients of MITs Promise of the Future Award, which recognizes students for outstanding work and activism in the technology world.

Well, that’s it for this edition of Voices of the Past. If you are using the web to communicate heritage, we’d like to hear from you. Share your story with us by going to our Voices of the Past shownotes site. There, you can also find links to all of today’s stories. And, until next time, we’ll see you on-line.

The World Digital Library received more than seven million page views on its debut April 21. The World Digital Library promotes international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provides resources to educators, expands non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and contributes to scholarly research.

The site features significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including maps, rare books, musical scores, photographs and architectural drawings. Other features include “search and browse” by place, time, topic, type of item and contributing institution. It will also include a “Memory of” section devoted to in-depth exploration of the culture and history of individual countries.

Since Librarian of Congress James Billington first proposed the establishment of a World Digital Library during his speech to the U.S. National Commission for Unesco in 2005, the Library of Congress, with Google’s assistance, has worked to create the online library.

The Museums and the Web conference in Indianapolis addressed the social, cultural and technological issues of heritage online in April. The conference included workshops, professional forums and “best of the web” awards.

To celebrate Preservation Month this May, the National Trust for Historic Preservation is bring back its popular This Place Matters social media campaign. The campaign encourages people across the country to showcase the places that matter to them. To participate, start by downloading the This Place Matters sign and take a photo or shoot a video of your favorite site. Then, share your content with the trust using online media sharing services like Flickr and YouTube.

Preservation Month was designed to raise awareness about how historic preservation can protect and enhance our homes, neighborhoods and communities. And it provides an opportunity for all of us to become involved in the growing preservation movement.

Cemetery care and maintenance are undergoing a surge in popularity that hasn’t been seen since the Victorian era. Cemetery grave markers are at once memorials to those we’ve loved and pieces of art. Caring for them provides a connection to a world before the Internet absorbed all of our attention.

The National Center for Preservation Technology and Training is planning a nationwide cemetery preservation summit in Nashville later this year to bring together people from all over the country who are doing cemetery preservation. Anybody interested in cemeteries, conservators, people who manage and run cemeteries, and cemetery support groups are all invited to attend the summit. The summit will cover an array of issues with a wide range of people doing preservation work in different areas. For more information, visit the NCPTT website or any of the center’s groups or feeds on Facebook and Twitter.

ARE YOU USING SOCIAL MEDIA TO TALK ABOUT HERITAGE? Then we’d like to talk to you: E-mail your story ideas or content to interact@preservationtoday.com or visit “You Report” on our site.

Stories this time:

The March edition of Past Horizons Magazine is now out. The magazine features articles on field school opportunities and how to make archeology accessible to the disabled. According to its publishers, the goal of Past Horizons is to give everyone a voice in heritage.  In addition to the magazine, Past Horizons Heritage Media features a blog on archeological discovery and a YouTube-style video sharing service. Past Horizons is based in Scotland.

The U.S.-based National Trust for Historic Preservation is developing a new online community.  According to the Trust, this new community is designed to ignite interest in places rich with heritage, history and culture. The site will allow participants to interact around the heritage of town’s and cities, allowing vacationers to quote Travel With Purpose. The Trust is now holding a pre-launch recognition program that offers special benefits to those who sign up for the site now. Participants will have the opportunity to share travel experiences through reviews and ratings and photographs. The community will be a part of the National Trust’s subsidiary, Heritage Travel Incorporated.

The Trust is also using Facebook to raise funds for its rebuilding effort in the Gulf Coast. Facebook’s new marketplace feature is launching an initiative called “Celebrities Selling for a Cause.” Actress Jennifer Coolidge is selling a custom-made dress she wore when starring in the film Legally Blonde 2 and donating the proceeds to benefit the National Trust’s “Rebuilding New Orleans” project. You don’t have to be a celebrity to participate. Anyone can buy an item or sell one on behalf of the National Trust and all the proceeds will go toward our efforts along the Gulf Coast.

The Smithsonian Institution recently held a two-day gathering exploring how to make the organization’s collections, educational resources, and staff more accessible, engaging, and useful in the digital age. The event, called Smithsonian 2.0, brought together professionals from the web and new media world to meet with Smithsonian staff members. Together, they worked to envision generate what a digital Smithsonian might be like in the years ahead. Speakers included representatives from Facebook, Myspace and Microsoft. Professionals in the museum field are welcoming the Smithsonian’s interest in social media. The event was the brianchild of G. Wayne Clough, who became the Smithsonian’s new secretary in July. According to Clough, the Smithsonian intends to aggressively pursue a participatory web-based presence following the conference.

The UNESCO office in Lima, Peru is seeking international specialists to aid in the development of heritage site management plans for the Pachacamac archeological complex and the Lines and Geoglyphs of Nazca and Pampas de Jumana. The heritage plans would include establishing priorities for halting site deterioration, reviving building and land use techniques, and raising community awareness about the historical and cultural meaning and importance of both sites. The project is being conducted in agreement with the National Institute of Culture of Peru.

The Obama administration recently unveiled the new Whitehouse.gov website. According to Macon Phillips, the Director of New Media for the White House, the new site is being built on the social media principles of communication, transparency and participation. Among the site features so far are a blog, a comment form and a briefing room. Obama, who currently has four and a half million Facebook friends, used social media extensively during his campaign for the presidency.

And finally, Preservation Today now has its own Friendfeed room. The room will allow fast-paced discussions on the latest in heritage preservation. Sign-up is quick, easy and free. All you have to do is visit our shownotes site at preservation today dot com and click the “News Stream” link at the top of the page.

As India continues its recovery from the recent terrorist attacks, attention is shifting to the resulting damage to cultural resources. The Taj Hotel was one of the worst-hit locations in the attacks. The hotel is home to more than 2,500 works of art valued in the millions. Among the works confirmed destroyed are a series of three paintings by Maqbul Fida Hussain, who is a significant figure in the Indian modernism. The ninety-three-year-old Hussain says he will begin a news series of paintings for the hotel that condemn the attack. The fate of many of the hotel’s other paintings is still unknown. Heritage resources have not been immune to the downturn in the economy.

State parks are suffering drastic cuts or closing altogether across the country. In his remarks at a governor’s conference in Philadelphia on December second, President-elect Barack Obama acknowledged the risk the bad economy poses to the United States’ heritage resources.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation named California’s State Parks to its annual list of America’s Eleven Most Endangered Historic Places earlier this year when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recommended cuts that would have closed 48 parks. Likewise, New Jersey and Illinois announced high-profile closings in their state parks this year.

A new research project is investigating a new aspect of the Underground Railroad along the Texas-Louisiana border during that region’s colonial era. According to principal investigator Rolonda Teal, her research focuses on Los Adaes, the former capital of Spanish Texas. Teal hopes to have the region recognized as a part of the Network to Freedom program, which promotes and preserves sites that played major roles in the liberation of slaves in the United States.. The program is a partnership of the National Park Service and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

Recovery work is continuing on the Kate Chopin House in north Louisiana. The National Historic Landmark was destroyed by fire in October. The structure was named for the legendary feminist writer who lived there during the eighteen eighties. It was also home to the Bayou Folk Museum, which contained hundreds of artifacts related to the history of the Cane River region. Joining Garrett in the studio to talk about the recovery and what the significance of the building is Dustin Fuqua. Fuqua is co-founder of the heritage research organization Cultural Lore, which had recently completed an inventory of the museum contents. The inventory was funded by a grant from the Cane River National Heritage Area.

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin are taking a closer look at their campus as a cultural landscape. The research began as a grant from the Getty Foundation as part of its Campus Heritage Grant program. The grant is funding a survey of the campuses’ original forty acres, which dates to the 1880s. According to Fran Gale, Director of the UT Architectural Conservation Laboratory, researchers are making valuable discoveries as a result of this project. The recommendations coming out of this survey will be used to recommend methods to preserve and maintain historic buildings on the campus.

Contribute to our report by using the tag “VoicesofthePast” for your online heritage preservation content. We’ll use it for our blog and maybe even report on it in our next show.

August 2008 Contents include:

Archeologists confirmed that Ferry Farm in Fredericksburg, Virginia is the site of President George Washington’s boyhood home. The site was found after a seven year search and more than 500,000 artifacts from 11 time periods have been found.
National Geographic

Fox News

New York Times

RMJM Hiller has been hired to complete an independent evaluation of Charity Hospital in New Orleans. The report should play a major role in decisions concerning the construction of new hospitals in the area. Charity Hospital is the most prominent example of art deco architecture in in New Orleans and it has a history that goes back more than 250 years.

The Foundation for Historical Louisiana

Building Design and Construction

Next American City Magazine

The Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation has acquired 189 acres of one of the nation’s most endangered battlefields. The acquisition will protect Cedar Creek Battlefield for the controversial expansion of a nearby limestone quarry.

Shenandoah Stories

Washington Times

National Park Service Digest

Record-breaking floods across the Midwest have destroyed or damaged numerous cultural institutions, public buildings, rural landscapes and historic districts. Brucemore, a site owned by the National Trust, has become a hub for recovery efforts. Several organizations are heading up recovery efforts including Silos and Smokestacks National Heritage Area and The American Institute of Conservation.

Iowa Floods

The National Trust Weblog

The 9th annual VAST International Symposium on virtual reality, archeology and cultural heritage will take place in Portugal this December. The symposium will present a dialogue on the present and future of archeology in the 21st century.

VAST Symposium

Only 1,800 gingerbread houses remain in Russia as the country struggles to balance preservation with the demands of development. In Tomsk, Russia, $3 million from the city treasury is being used to restore these buildings.

International Herald Tribune

The New York Times

More than $165,000 have been awarded to fund research projects that use technology to advance preservation. Four projects were funded as part of a grants program administered by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Those receiving funding include The National Trust for Historic Preservation, The Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Tulane University.

David Morgan, Chief of Archeology and Collections at the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, gives information on what the center looks for in a grant proposal and how to apply.

Morgan also speaks about the upcoming “Prospection in Depth” workshop in San Francisco.

Prospection in Depth Archaeology Workshop

Museum 2.0 is a blog by Nina Simon on heritage issues. The site explores how museums can apply social media principles to become more engaging, community-based and vital to society.

Museum 2.0

Jonathon Bailey, creator of Plagiarism Today, one of the web’s top resources for content and privacy issues, talks about how to protect your content online. Bailey discusses the importance of monitoring your content and how to license your work under Creative Commons.

Jonathan Bailey on the web:

Site: http://www.plagiarismtoday.com

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/plagiarismtoday

Podcast: http://www.copyright20.com

Email: jonathan@plagiarismtoday.com

Online content and Identity protection resources

http://creativecommons.org

http://www.copyscape.com/

http://www.bitscan.com and http://www.copyalerts.com

http://www.copyright.gov

http://www.domaintools.com

http://sciencecommons.org/

http://www.wikipedia.org/

http://www.archive.org

Cast and Crew:
Jeffery K. Guin, executive producer

Brittany Byrd, producer

David Antilley, director

Adam Caldwell, assistant director

Farrah Reyna, anchor

Lane Luckie, anchor

Partners in this production:

City of Natchitoches, La.

Silos and Smokestacks National Heritage Area

National Center for Preservation Technology & Training

Northwestern State University of Louisiana