An Archive of Their Own

 As the early adapters among the silent and boomer generations go to the grave what happens to their digital archives?

As a failed historian I lean towards preserving every record, just because scholars have been able to wring meaning from the documentary evidence of the past, even when it's scant.  

As an active user of a Pc for close to 30 years, I know there's an infinitesimal chance that anything in my digital files would be of value to a future historian.  That's true in abstract, even more true given the lack of organization of the files.

A third factor is the ever-declining cost of storage, which leads to the logic of why not preserve it, because we don't know what future historians will be able to do using AI.

I suspect there's a niche for an archive service for personal digital files. That would differ from the services which archive what's on the internet.

I'm Not Sane--per K. Williamson

Kevin Williamson has a column on institutions and the FBI, writing:

"And no sane person believes for a nanosecond that those “lost” communications represent anything other than willful obstruction of justice." 

Personally, I'd be willing to bet that the reasons the emails were "lost" can be traced to a long lasting gap in bureaucratic cultures.  Specifically, the records management people have always focused on paper preservation, and rarely have ranked high in the pecking in bureaucracies.  It's taken 20 years for NARA to start to accommodate electronic records, and I suspect they've yet to achieve full integration.  

The IT folks, on the other hand, have a culture focused on the future and a bit on the present, but rarely on the past.  C.P. Snow in the 1950's had a book entitled "Two Cultures", arguing that science and the  humanities didn't talk to each other, and they should.  Today's divide between archives and IT is worse.

In the middle of all this are the people who have to implement IT rules and archive requirements--the users.  These are the people who leave their passwords at the default, or use admin1234. 

Toss in Murphy's Law, and I'll bet there was no willful obstruction of justice.

Our Missing History

Read Fred Kaplan on the chasms in our federal archives. The one problem with his piece is he's citing a National Archives study from 2005, not 2008. So when it says the National Archives can't accept Powerpoint, it's probably obsolete information. But still scary (since Condi Rice was denied access to Rumsfeld's Powerpoint presentation pre-Iraq war, showing how key such things are).

Saving Everything in the Government

This is an interesting endeavor:

"A new international task force will convene for the first time Tuesday to address the problem of maintaining data for future generations.

The National Science Foundation and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation are funding the Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access panel's two-year mission, with support from institutions like the Council on Library and Information Resources, Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, and the United Kingdom's Joint Information Systems Committee."

And later

"But she said the formal processes used to designate materials for storage or deletion are integral to sustainability across the globe because it is impossible to save everything."

It might well be possible to save everything. After all, Google Docs saves all the changes made to a document, just as Wikipedia does. Storage costs are going down and down and down.

But if you do save everything, will anyone be able to find what they want? Maybe. Google desktop indexes most everything.

But if you save everything, and anyone can find anything, will anyone care? The problem is the same as for wiretapping, or security cameras, you mostly can only review some stuff in real time. And humans are easily bored. As a natural born pack rat, I saved most everything from my bureaucratic career, at least after the PC landed on my desk. But no one will care. (Unlike Samuel Pepys, no one will write books about mid-level bureaucrats.)