Archivist Alison

What else is a computer but a glorious place of experimentation where the prospect of UNDO is totally real?

My laptop’s hard drive crashed a few weeks ago. It went the way that many iffy hard drives go, it made some noises for a while (I ignored those) and then, one day, my computer wouldn’t boot. No operating system.

Please allow me to use this teachable moment to remind you of the importance of both backup and archiving strategies. I wrote a post a long time back on the differences between backups and archives, and you can certainly go back and refresh your memory on that. Here, however, I’d like to post the most important aspect of either strategy.

• Keep multiple copies of your data.

This does not have to be expensive, difficult or time-consuming. As a first step, for example, you can of course just dump all of your data onto CD/DVDs periodically (or another hard drive, for that matter). How often you do this will depend on how risk averse you are and how time-dependent your work is, but consider a monthly copy. This will provide a better-than-nothing backup. I went into a bit more detail about copying strategies in my post on scanning your personal photos.

You can also take advantage of online backup services, but do beware…offers that sound too good to be true are indeed usually too good to be true. Any service that does not charge you by the gigabyte, for example, is to be distrusted right away. That is not to say that they may not be on the level, but if you are paying for data storage they should charge you for storing your data and that is measured in bytes. I know it is tedious, but it is always worthwhile to read the terms and conditions of these sites. (I did a small review of the pitfalls in the terms and conditions of sites that are not online backup services. Check it over to see how important it is to read these sorts of documents, even if you have to wade through copious legalese.)

You may also note that I would not trust an online backup solution to be my only copy. I would like to have one physically around me as well. But, sometimes, I understand, life gets in the way. It’s all about the risks you are willing to take, and losing data is not always the worst thing in the world.

But now that almost all family photos are digital files, it is worth considering how valuable our data really is and the importance of constructing an appropriate backup plan (and archiving plan…but those are even more time-consuming).

You may be wondering if I lost any data from my own experience this month. No, I didn’t. But only because I got lucky. I hadn’t fully followed my own sage advice.

At the beginning of every New Year, a vast quantitly of magazine articles start to appear touting a new way to change our lives for the better. I used to read these sorts of things with some interest, and then I lost interest and ignored them. Now, they make me irritated and a little angry. What, precisely, was so wrong about the way I acted last year (and I’m just speaking on a personal level, here) that I need to be castigated for it…knowing, of course, that in 365 more days I’ll need to be brought up short again for the way I have behaved this year.

Drives me nuts, but I suppose others see it differently.

Sameness and Difference

To bring this around to the general topic of this site, these New Year’s suggestions for “a new revolutionary change in our lives” also reminds me of a tension I often see in information collections—the one between sameness and difference. This is an old-school, well-trodden philosophical dichotomy (similarity v. difference, I mean), but it is an inescapable one.

As we collect objects and information around us over time (or purge it all), trends become apparent. Looking back, we can see that some of these trends are marked by the similar things that we do or do not keep over time (or do or do not perform) while others are marked by a difference in behavior. Difference usually makes itself known in the guise of surprise or maybe dismay. As in, “Oh! I didn’t expect that!” or “What’s this thing?” Too much difference, and we start to doubt that we are looking at our own belongings.

Assuming that I am not alone in this observation, I might argue here that such responses suggest that we are comfortable with a certain balance between sameness and difference in our information collections, and the precise shape of our comfort levels here would be unique, as would our collections.

Does this leave space for revolution, these New Year’s changes that are supposed to rock our world to its foundations? What would such a shift look like in our collections? Would it look like purging? Would it look like a radical difference that bore no resemblance to our former state of sameness?

Sameness and Belonging(s)

I suppose I am too cynical to believe that the vast majority of individuals who take on these New Year’s revolutionary activities actually see any long term difference in their behavior. After all, my argument here is that most of us have a comfort level with sameness that outweighs our comfort level with difference, and there is not much more “different” than a revolution in behavior.

No, when we look at our collections, I propose that we seek sameness as a marker of belonging. Difference is tolerated, even adored, but perhaps only in accordance with our individual tastes.

My own tolerance for revolution and radical difference is obviously quite small. For me, such revolutionary efforts so often result in no lasting change, leaving us basically back where we began (back to the similarity of our former routine). Only now, we might also feel that we have failed at something we once wanted so much to achieve. Change, for me, is a gradual thing. Important, but rarely revolutionary. I suppose others might feel that radical change and difference brings them hope. Perhaps they feel that a stagnant routine is stifling. I could see how that might be.

Whatever your predilections here, Happy 2010 to all of you. New Year, New You. New Year, Same (Old) You. For all of us, New Year, New Opportunities.

I have been doing a lot of thinking recently about the imagined audiences we have for our collections. In this moment, I mean the audiences that will confront our collections after we are gone.

Some things we keep for our children because these particular objects “belong” to them or were made by them. This is sometimes how people approach the problem of saving their children’s art, and it is also part of the reason my own childhood baby blanket is safe in my mother’s house.

And, yet, we choose to collect other objects with our children in mind for some reasons beyond pre-existing claims on ownership. Do we not also keep some things because we want our children to understand better some event, some happening, some decision that we make, but we know that they will not be capable of any sophisticated understanding until they are older?

Do we not sometimes decide to collect and keep evidence of some important, frightening, crucial, amusing, devastating or otherwise transformative moment in our lives in an attempt not only to remember ourselves, but also to allow a child to re-interpret the past through more mature eyes? Do we not sometimes make an effort to preserve some sort of physical representation of an authentic, important, fleeting human experience, even though we know that this lightning-flash confluence of events will be irretrievably and inexorably distanced from the future lives that our children—or any future observer—will be leading? Do we not wish, from time to time, that these puny scraps or remnants of our lives could show the future something of the complexity of the lives that were once led?

Such things do not always happen with children in mind, of course. But if not for our them, then for whom? For whom do we collect? To whom do we hope to communicate and what do we wish to say? I might go so far as to say that all collections are made with an eye towards some sort of  imagined audience, and this changes what we keep and what we destroy.

Moreover, collections do not necessarily always strive for truth. What if we want the future to see a different version of the story than the one we ourselves experienced?

From an archival point of view, I cannot imagine that these collections are any more or less valuable if they never actually find their way into the hands of the particular community imagined by its creator or creators, and there are times when we will never know this particular sort of contextual information. But we would like to believe it was there. The imagined recipient. The look on their faces as they leaf through the collections. The waves of understanding that come over them as they start to piece together the past.

And yet, looking back on the information collections made by previous generations—and not just in my own family, also those with whom I have no native connection—I find that the chasm between their lived experiences and mine seem unbridgeable, and not simply because what they have left for me is so meager. I firmly believe that an infinite amount of physical evidence left by their existence would still not be enough. It is hard enough to understand the living, breathing people around us, the people we can speak with, share experiences with and ask questions of. How can inanimate objects be expected to communicate any more eloquently?

Despite this, the collections we encounter from the past still seem to reach out and request our understanding. They elicit our investigation. They pique our curiosity.  Perhaps they remind us we are not alone in our continuing attempts to listen and be heard, to understand and be understood. Even across time, even in an utterly imperfect form, the human urge to communicate with others is recognized, and we respond in kind.

What do you get when you cross an everyday, mass-produced object with a really good, yet fictitious, backstory?

That sure does sound like the beginning of a rip-roaring information management joke, but since there is no such thing as a rip-roaring information management joke (please, someone out there prove me wrong), it will just have to serve as the introduction to this post about the Significant Objects website.

According to the site’s creators, the purpose of the Significant Objects project is to test what happens to an ordinary, everyday object’s perceived monetary value when that item is associated with, basically, a really good story. The site’s “curators” go out and purchase very inexpensive items at thrift stores and garage sales, and then they commission writers to write about these objects, encouraging them to give the items significance through their writing. Once the story is complete and published on the site, the object, along with its new and completely invented backstory, goes onto Ebay to see what it fetches in dollars. In no way are the site’s creators trying to fool the Ebay customers into paying for garbage. They are trying to make this process as transparent as possible. They really want to know how an object can be imbued with significance (as measured by auction value) through words.

Head on over there and check out the types of objects we’re talking about. They are the normal flotsam and jetsam of a mass-produced world: trophies for basketball, small statuettes, measuring spoons shaped like fish. The site even has the objects categorized by a truly fascinating group of nouns: talismans, totems, evidence and fossils. What a taxonomy!

But what does the project show? Do these items gain monetary value after they gain their fictitious significance? Well, the measuring spoons shaped like fish were purchased by the site’s curators for $2.99. With their associated backstory, they ended up fetching $76. $76!

From an archivist’s point of view, these stories that give significance (as measured by auction value) to these cookie-cutter reminders of our mass-produced society are equivalent to an invented context. Context, to an archivist, is to be protected and guarded above almost everything else. And for good reason. How glorious is the power of context in our current society that an entirely fictitous one can “increase the significance” of an object in dollars, even if only to one person.

Of course, some of the increase in value might also come from the fact that these objects took part in the Significant Objects project itself, but still, I am truly left wondering: if these fictional, contextual backstories can effect this kind of change, what might the real context do. Sometimes the story told by these objects’ authentic contexts may be less interesting than what these writers invent, but operating on the notion that truth is almost always stranger than fiction, this would not always be the case.

Especially nowadays when everyone owns the same watch, or the same purse, or the same wallet, or the same clothes, or the same trophies, or the same glassware, or the same toothpick holders, the power of context shines through. It is not just what you have, it is why you have it and what you do with it.

For easy reference, I’ve added a new permanent page over there to the right about the keeper-purger spectrum.

Where do you place yourself?

I see discussions around the Interwebs about this show on A&E called “Hoarders.” I’ll link to it here because Internet-style dictates it, but I’d really rather not.

In fact, I don’t really even want to spend an entire post on this show because that dignifies it as something important to me. However, I have seen too many posts about the ways in which this series has been “encouraging” folks to “do something” about their lives to stay silent.

First of all, let me say to A&E that the next time they do a “reality show” whose producer owns a company that supposedly helps people “fix” the problems addressed in the show, they should call the stupid thing an INFOMERCIAL and be done with it.

Second of all, let me say that at both ends of the keeper-purger spectrum lies trouble. I am in no way suggesting that obsessive hoarding is not a psychological issue that needs treatment. Obsessive purging can cause problems too.

What I am suggesting is that this show is actually aimed at keepers who wish they were purgers. I’m reading it all over the Web. This sort of thing frightens them. It makes them think that they aren’t doing “what they are supposed to do.” It makes them wonder if their life is as bad as what they are seeing on this show.

I resent that.

Why isn’t there a show that shows how Gwyneth Paltrow’s purge-everything approach to life verges on the pathological? Why doesn’t A&E do a whole series on people who can’t seem to keep anything around? There could be an episode about a couple who looks around their house and says, “We just don’t like any of the furniture we buy. So we throw it out! Our children will just have to get used to sleeping on the floor.”

I will tell you why. Because to be comfortable with being a purger is to recognize one’s own privilege. It is saying, “I trust that I will not need all this stuff later. Other things will come my way. I will be provided for in the future, even if I do not keep all of this.” Is it at all surprising that children of the Depression are shown as the most stereotypical hoarders of all? Those of us who have never known deprivation have much less trouble throwing things away. That doesn’t make for cringe-worthy television.

Please allow me to conclude this most tirade-filled of posts by reminding you that I see no moral value in how we keep or how we purge. At each extreme of this spectrum lies the potential for trouble, but not moral trouble…only the potential for psychological and social trouble. Let us not make the different ways that we each keep our personal collections a matter of judgement, of criticizing others and saying “there but for the grace of God go I.”

“Normal” is a construct that we were all taught to aspire towards, but that no one can actually reach. There is too much variety in this world to assume that we should all be the exact same.  To see strangers living in a way that we would not choose to live is, honestly, none of our business. If you have family with extreme tendencies in this arena, you are in a different boat.

A&E is exploiting our innate tendencies towards schadenfreude in a way that seems brutish to me. And the person who convinced them to do it seems to be profiting off of it. Shame on them all.