The Mystery of Historical Preservation----

If you click on the link, you can see the recent September 2008 minutes of the Evansville Historical Preservation Committee which has voted $600 to aid the digitization project putting old Evansville Review articles on digital for preservation---I do support that notion of historical preservation---however in reviewing the broader notion of historical preservation I recently got a note from our city administrator, Dan Wietecha in which he said, in response to my freedom of information request for the audio tapes from the planning commission meetings of 2005:

Dick-

I’d be happy to help, but I don’t think there’s too much we can provide. Meetings are recorded to assist in typing the minutes, not to create an audio record of the meeting. The record retention requirement on such recordings is only 90 days. I think in practice we actually keep them longer, say a year, but we don’t have the tapes from 2005 any longer.

-Dan


Here is the bottom line: We like to preserve some things, while we destroy the very basis of history itself. Other communities are placing their meeting audio on the internet on a regular basis and indeed converting the audio to ditigal is almost free.

We want to treasure bricks, but forget everything else. Kinda funny huh?

That is how I see it. And you?