digital time bombs
I rather enjoyed the Hedstrom article, http://www.uky.edu/~kiernan/DL/hedstrom/html. Something not mentioned is a newer problem with digital preservation which results from the prevalence of email. When business was conducted primarily by paper memo, effort was made to state the whole case in one shot, which keeps down the amount of relevant paper to be archived. With emails however, multiple exchanges now take place where before there might have been as little as two, drastically increasing the amount of historically relevant material. All of which need to be preserved and kept in useable format. For example, I can no longer recall where I read it, NARA has to deal with archiving and sifting through for historical relevance literally millions of emails from the last couple presidential administrations.
February 13th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
Thats something I’ve been thinking about too. Its unfathomable at the amount of e-mails that even I create–to think about each institution and how they have to actively be prepared to archive that material….
February 13th, 2006 at 11:58 pm
The really tragic thing to me is that if you’re a historian of the 19th century, you can mine individual people’s collected papers in various archives - it’s much less likely, however, that people today will be as scrupulous about keeping their e-mail correspondence as our predecessors were about their paper files…
February 14th, 2006 at 2:09 am
You make a really good point. Although we like to think we’re doing great things by saving trees, we’re also creating a lot more work for ourselves. However, your post also made me think about how often we all just delete emails and IM’s, instead of saving them (a point Josh made in his comment). My family has some really great telegrams and letters my grandpa sent to my grandma during WWII. I can’t imagine gathering the grandkids around ye olde computer to read my IM messages or emails from my youth…pretty unlikely I’d save them and just not as cool.
February 14th, 2006 at 2:23 pm
Yeah, to echo your comments, I have often wondered about all of this. I’ve considered printing out emails that I think might be important to me later, but that would be time consuming and would requre space that I just don’t have.