Category Archives: Uncategorized

Using Data Analysis to Inform Visitor Driven Organizations

| August 2, 2021

How do serve your mission, your visitors and keep the lights on? That’s a question that nonprofit leaders in the cultural and museum fields ask themselves every day and is all in a day’s work for Colleen Dilenschneider, today’s guest on PreserveCast. Colleen provides data and analysis to inform the evolution of visitor-serving organizations so that they may optimize mission execution and financial sustainability. I’ve been following Colleen’s blog for many years – and have always found her analysis to be some of the very best out there for visitor serving organizations – a voice I knew I wanted to bring to our growing PreserveCast audience.

Documenting the Physical Vestiges of Slavery and Tenant Farming with Jason Church

| July 19, 2021

All across America, the physical vestiges of slavery and tenant farming are being lost to the ravages of time and indifference. Without expert documentation – there’s a real chance we could lose all memory and understanding of these important buildings. That’s why Preservation Maryland is partnering with the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training to laser scan structures on Maryland’s eastern shore as a part of a broader national effort – a topic we knew we had to bring to our listeners.

Exploring Heritage Entertainment with Past Preservers Founder Nigel Hetherington

| June 21, 2021

Over the course of the past year on PreserveCast, we’ve explored several crossovers between heritage preservation and entertainment – with a particular focus on the BBC “farm” series – and this week’s episode is a further dive into this concept with the founder of Past Preservers, a firm dedicated to that very work of connecting experts with media.

Resurrecting Age Old Trades at Guédelon

| June 14, 2021

In Burgundy, France, around forty workers are taking up an extraordinary challenge: to build a fortified castle using the techniques and materials used in the Middle Ages. It’s almost a surreal project and today we’re talking with Sarah Preston, a bilingual tour guide at Guédelon, a site that is literally resurrecting age old trades in the name of preservation, history and understanding.

D-Day Land: A Conflict Between Tourism and Respect

| June 7, 2021

As a preservationist, I cut my teeth on battlefield preservation – working for what’s today the American Battlefield Trust. I led an effort to defeat a proposed Gettysburg casino – so the idea of how we preserve and protect hallowed battlefields has always interested me. That’s why when I heard about a controversial proposal to build a so called, “D-Day land,” I knew we had a good fit – and so on this week’s PreserveCast, we’re heading to the bocage country to talk about heritage preservation with a French twist.

The Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts With BBC’s Alex Langlands

| May 17, 2021

To regular listeners of PreserveCast, you know that I’m a huge fan of the BBC “farm” series – which have explored Tudor, Victorian, Edwardian and other eras of British history. Alex Langlands rounds out our interviews with each of the presenters from the series – and Alex also recently published a new book, Craeft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts, which is a perfect topic of conversation at a moment when the world is almost entirely virtual.