From fragile early wax recordings to today’s podcasts, the nation’s audio heritage is at peril, a report from the Library of Congress has concluded. The report, an outgrowth of a 2000 law mandating the Library of Congress to put together a national media preservation plan, found that efforts to preserve sound recordings are a haphazard patchwork threatened by poor funding and technical skills, copyright restrictions and, in the case of modern recordings, the very ephemeral nature of the Internet.
