An interesting article in the Los Angeles Times about the fragile state of an important (analogue) historical radio archive. The carefully preserved original scripts, fragile transcriptions of radio shows and news broadcasts, antique microphones and rare equipment from Southern California’s first stations have been accidentally contaminated by toxic PCBs.

The dangers may be different but the challenges involved in digital preservation are similarly about trying to predict the unexpected, calculate risk and always having a contingency plan.

On 16th July 1969 Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin successfully took off from Cape Kennedy, Florida in a spacecraft named Apollo 11 that would eventually land on the moon. Ever since the father of space travel, Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, established the basics of rocket science in 1879 man has been fascinated by delving further and further towards the ultimate boundaries of Space. Recently interest in Space travel has been rekindled due to U.S. president George Bush’s announcement that American astronauts would return to the moon by 2020 in order to orchestrate further missions into Space. The Spoken Word has various interesting segments of media relating to Space:

• Fly me to the Moon: Part 1
• Fly me to the Moon: Part 2
• China’s Space Plans: Part 1
• China’s Space Plans: Part 2