The History of One Building Highlights the Danger in How We Keep Records

Addison Del Mastro was intrigued by the building you see here. Yes, it's a Pizza Hut, but it is somewhat different from the iconic architectural style of the pizza chain. We've seen plenty of buildings with that style that used to be Pizza Huts, but this is the opposite- a Pizza Hut that apparently used to be something else. So Del Mastro started researching the location's history. It wasn't easy.

While the story behind the building is quite a ride, the greater story is the way record-keeping is changing and and how fragile digital records really are. Digitizing books, photos, historical records, and newspapers seems like a wonderful idea, because it saves physical storage space and makes searching easier, but it also relies on changing technology. Think of all the digital files that are lost when a storage system becomes obsolete. Online digital files depend on servers, which depend on power, which depends on money. Many historic document files will only be kept as long as they are profitable. A lot of what Del Mastro found was crowdsourced from people's memories, and those people and their memories won't be around forever. Read about this particular architectural history project and the roadblocks thrown up at The Deleted Scenes. -via Metafilter


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We have a new pizza hut near me that's pretty good. I say "new" because I think it's only been there about 5 years. It's very tiny, couched into a small strip mall. Carry-out only, no seating.
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