Building Conservation Blog Additions

Although the students are still on break, school doesn't resume until next weekend, and we have been posting a little less frequently, we have made additions and improvements to this blog as time allowed. In a "behind the scenes" change, we updated to Google's new version of Blogger, although we may eventually switch to a more sophisticated blogging tool such as Wordpress, Typepad, or Movable Type. Most other changes have involved reorganizing the various sections of links and adding numerous new links, particularly under the Historic Preservation and Related Organizations (National) heading. Since many students will be graduating this spring, we have also added links to the Historic Preservation Employment section.

We also hope to add a "blog roll," or list of web logs addressing historic preservation issues as well as links to reading materials that will be useful and convenient for our students, faculty, alumni, and other preservation professionals.

While we have endeavored to locate other preservation blogs, and blogs dealing with related topics such as housing rehabilitation, downtown revitalization, and planning, we haven't found many, even though we queried members of the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Forum listserv and others (we listed a few of the blogs we found during our initial search in our December 19th post). This leads us to speculate that although blogs are becoming an increasingly common communication, information sharing, and social networking tool, the phenomenon has not yet caught on among preservation professionals and organizations.

We would really appreciate hearing about any blogs that would be interesting to our community of preservation students and professionals as well as how preservation (and related) organizations are using blogs to further their missions; please leave comments and link(s) below. (Thanks!) Of course, we would also be pleased to hear about any other resources that we can add to this blog to better inform and educate our students.

We have also, perhaps temporarily, abbreviated the "About Us" section, since we now link to the new Rensselaer Building Conservation program website which provides much more information about the program than can easily be included here.