To Preserve or Not to Preserve

I’m old school when it comes to school work — I keep hard copies of everything. Syllabi, papers, book reports, projects.  I’ve had to fight with administrators too many times over what I did or didn’t do for a class in order to try to get additional credit.  (I also keep all my printed sources for a while — until I’m sure I won’t be challenged — and I keep the ones that were hard to find (or expensive to photocopy) for longer than that.  I also keep a few sets of sources in areas that are particularly interesting me, because the same set of sources can often support more than one paper or project.)  I also collect up the hard copies of final papers with the professor’s comments whenever possible — I have had a fair amount of success with getting copies of my final paper back if I was willing to put a LOT of stamps on a big envelope.

So my school work — I’m set there.  The rest of life is a little bit harder.  I print and keep e-mails or web sites that are of particular interest, but I don’t do as much to keep e-mails as I should.  I’m already seeing that family conversations take place in e-mails and not in letters — though, frankly, I never kept too many letters and probably wouldn’t be inclined too.  My family has just never been that interesting.  We do have some old letters from when grandpa was “overseas” in World War I — that sort of thing I think we’d all know enough to keep now.

One that that has been interesting is the culture of collecting.  When I was a kid, complete collections were valuable — if you had the baseball cards from Topps for a particular year, that was really something.  If you had all the Batman comics from the beginning, you were impressive (and presumptively rich).  But once people started figuring that out — drat you, Boomers, and your mad need to collect — the companies started responding.  Topps started selling complete sets of cards that anyone could buy.  Took all the work out of it (but also took out some of the fun of finding one of those last few cards you needed — on the other hand, it reduced the problem of having three dozen Alan Trammel cards from the 1983 Tigers (the year BEFORE they won the World Series)).  And don’t start on Beanie Babies, which were collected frantically by people — or maybe that’s just me, since Beanie Babies were after my time.  I DID want a complete set of Star Wars Action Figures, to fill my Darth Vadar collectors’ case (and how I wish I still had THAT).  Anyway, it seems clear that people got more savvy about collecting things that made sense to collect — we still have grandpa’s mess kit and the bag that his gas mask came in (though, sadly, not the gas mask itself).

But one debate the family has had recently is pictures.  My mother (not on the cutting edge of technology) not only has her own digital camera (okay, Dad claims it’s his, but you can’t tell by looking) and has started taking classes at the local community college (and now the Apple store) about using the camera, downloading the pictures and manipulating them with software.  (Next stop:  pictures of me as a child with Richard Nixon or something equally odd — no, not really — my mother would NEVER want me anywhere near Nixon.)  So she and I had the digital picture discussion — should you print them? why? they just take up space.  And besides, they’re on the computer so they’ll always be there.  And I went through the whole argument — technologies change and the only way to be completely sure is to have a hard copy — it may not last forever but it may last a lot longer than a digital file.  Family photos are important to her — she has boxes and boxes — so she decided that printing at least some of them made sense.

I’ve been a scrapbooker — no, not that kind, just a person who puts things in a box or a book to hold them — since I started college.  So I’m in the habit of printing out pictures, articles, anything that catches my attention and putting it in a scrapbook.  Not sure what I’ll do with them ever — my college will likely accept the ones from my time there as part of their collection — but they’ve been handy on a number of occasions to find out when we saw a certain play or what our address was at a certain time.  So I probably have more collected history of my life in paper than some people.  I occasionally have this vision of someone going through my things in seventy or eighty years and throwing it all out, but who knows.  Maybe it’ll entertain some enterprising young historian who needs materials on life in the late 20th century — if only she can get the materials digitized so they can be “useful” . . .

-Tracy