There are many audio recordings of important and historical events stored at the Library of Congress in Washington DC.  However, many of these recording are becoming damaged and lost due to being stored on deteriorating formats and in conditions not suited for the fragile medium in which they are recorded.  As a result, the Library has announced the National Recording Preservation Plan, in an attempt to preserve these recordings for generations to come.

Among the plans, is a recommendation to create an archive of the recordings that will be accessible to everyone.  As the plan sits now, you will still have to take a trip to the Library of Congress to actually hear these recordings, but there are future plans to hopefully work out the necessary licensing agreements to allow the recordings to be streamed online for all.

In total, there are 32 recommendations in the plan, which also includes a university degree program for audio archiving, to prevent these problems from happening in the future.  It is very important that this work is finally being recognized as necessary because once these files are lost, they will never be recovered.

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Facebook is getting bigger and better and it appears like they will be giving you more capabilities as the social site grows. The new feature that they are adding is file sharing, which will soon be available to all the groups and will allow members of a group to share files of up to 25MB with each other.

The file sharing feature, of course, has been available for school-specific groups since last month, but they are expanding it now as it is one of the most requested features in Groups.

After the update a group page will have a “Files” tab at the top and an “upload file” icon in the publisher. You will be allowed to share presentations, schedules, documents and other files, but you won’t be able to upload music and executable program files. According to Facebook, “users can report files the same way they can with other content across the site“, which is for keeping an eye on illegal file-sharing.

The files uploaded into a group can be public or available to members-only based on the group’s privacy setting. Although the new files feature does not allow you to do online editing, you will be able to download files, edit them and upload the new versions, and the original version of the files will remain available.

According to Facebook, the feature is now available to a “small percentage” of groups, but will be rolled out to the rest of them soon.

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