Just stumbled on a note from one of our regular readers, christyanthemum (check out her blog, and her online bookstore), pointing us to old versions of North Country Public Radio’s web page. The Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine lets you look up old versions of web sites going back to 1996 (85 billion so far).

These are quite a blast from the NCPR past:

November 1998 (Old School Style)
April 1999 (Old But Improved Style)
June 2001 (In The “New” Style)

The Internet Archive also houses an incredible collection of moving images, live concerts, audio, and texts. Some Adirondack related examples include:

A circa 1936 educational film from the National Tuberculosis Association (founded by Edward Livingston Trudeau, described as the man who introduced “the modern method” of treating TB) entitled On The Firing Line.

A live recording of the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey at the Adirondack Mountain Music Festival at the Moose River Campground in Lyons Falls on May 31, 2003.

“Twilight” a recording of ambient drone chaos made in the mountains.

A down-loadable copy of Seneca Ray Stoddard’s 1874 Adirondacks Illustrated.

UPDATED 1/18/07: Ellen Rocco, Station Manager for NCPR, writes to us with this comment:

As for our website, aw, c’mon, this reminds me of the question I’m often asked about our former studio space in Payson Hall on the SLU campus: “Don’t you miss that charming old building with the double open staircase and 100-year old woodwork?”

My unequivocal answer: No!

It may have appeared charming to the casual visitor, but for those of us who used the space, charming was not the way we described the cramped quarters, wall paint chips on documents and tape, noise issues–including having to stop recording when trucks passed on the street outside or someone flushed the toilet over the production studio, etc. As with the old building, I have zero nostalgia for the old website. Now, users can find thousands of archived news stories and features, 22 topical series (I know the number because Dale Hobson, our web guru, just counted them yesterday) on things like rural homelessness, land-use, the justice system…, playlists and reading lists, blogs, regional concert hall and art gallery, links to all kinds of great websites, national/international news sources and on and on.

But it’s nice to know people are visiting ncpr.org…keep coming.

Ellen