From today’s AP Newswire:
Library of Congress Opens Registry for Historic Sounds
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats, Duke Ellington’s music and the Rev. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech are among the first 50 items placed on a national registry of sounds which opened Monday. Under a law passed in 2000, the new registry must “maintain and preserve sound recordings that are culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Those items include records made by inventor Thomas A. Edison in the 1880s and the first recordings of American Indian music. “We have to make judgments on what’s important,” Taft said, “and a hundred years from now some researcher may find we failed to save the one thing he wanted.”
—For some reason, the first thought that popped into my head when I read this was Lieu’s bathroom threads—surely those noises should be saved for posterity! Any other suggestions?
