Lou’s View – Sept. 29, 2016
Preserving Our Records
by Lou Bernard
I opened up the newspaper this morning as I drank my coffee. I like to read the actual paper—Not online, not something with pixels, actual paper that I can hold and cut things from. And I saw the story: The Clinton County Commissioners are going ahead with a plan to digitize courthouse records.
I am against this plan, mainly because I haven’t been able to watch The Blob in several years now.
The Blob was filmed in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, where my grandmother lived. When I was in my twenties, she gave me a VHS tape of the movie because she knew I liked it. I watched it happily for several years, until finally our VCR died, taking my wife’s Snow White tape with it.
I can no longer watch that tape, though I still own it. I haven’t seen VCRs for sale since I was in college. And, yes, I do realize that I could buy The Blob on DVD, and watch it. But how long until that’s not an option anymore? I don’t want to commit to replacing my entire movie collection every few years.
I’d like you to do an experiment for me. Go get your favorite device. A cell phone, an Ipod, your laptop, your Kindle. Whatever. Now show me something—A photo, a document—That you created ten years ago. It can’t be something from a website, or stored on whatever “the cloud” is—It has to be your thing, saved on your device.
Can’t do it, can you?
Here’s my point: Digitization doesn’t last.
From a “looking it up” point of view, digitized documents are great. They’re quick, they’re easy, and they’re searchable. From a document preservation standpoint, digitization is about the worst possible idea. Bear in mind that my job involves dealing with information that’s two hundred or so years old. When I say “permanent,” I’m referring to an item being around centuries from now, not whether the files can be transferred to a new device.
The first problem with digitization is that electronics are horribly temporary. The first time you turn a computer on, the clock is ticking: You have a few years before it’s not functional anymore. And in that time, any number of bad things can happen to the files. They can degrade, they can be corrupted, they can be hacked. The files on a computer simply will not last hundreds of years.
For that matter, neither will the computer itself. The technology changes so fast that it becomes obsolete almost as soon as you have it. That’s what I like best about paper records—We’re not going to have to upgrade to Paper 2.0 in a few years. We’re not going to have to spend hours each week downloading the paper upgrades. That’s the thing about paper: It’s there, it’s consistent, and it’s much more easily preservable than anything digital.
So what would I recommend, instead? Preservation-wise, the best thing would be acid-free preservation items. Paper, in the old days, was made with a certain amount of acid, which is why it slowly degrades. (It degrades over hundreds of years, though, not by the time you get it home, like electronics.) There is special paper made to be acid-free, and much longer lasting.
Encase each page in an acid-free sleeve to preserve the old records, and then copy them onto new acid-free paper. Store the old items, and allow the public to view the new copies. That will now give those records a much better shelf life. The new document, copied onto acid-free paper, will last much longer than anything you’re viewing on a screen.
If that plan doesn’t appeal, then microfilm is the next best option. It’s still not exactly permanent, but it lasts much longer than digitized documents, and is much less susceptible to corruption and obsolescence.
I want these things to be around—Not just for whatever the next technological advance is, but for centuries in the future. If you happen to read this article in a century, I’d like all the future people to know that I wanted to preserve the records. If you’re trying to read this online in the year 2116, well, good luck with that. But if you’ve found this on paper or microfilm, preserved at the library, then congratulations from the past—You’ve got the right idea.
