Fremantle
· archiving ·
Interesting article in the New York Times. Makes me even more keen to keep working on software that makes it easier to keep personal archives — but not keep everything.
Your Memories. Their Cloud. (archive), by Kashmir Hill, 2022 December 31:
I noticed a philosophical divide among the archivists I spoke with. Digital archivists were committed to keeping everything with the mentality that you never know what you might want one day, while professional archivists who worked with family and institutional collections said it was important to pare down to make an archive manageable for people who look at it in the future.
“It’s often very surprising what turns out to matter,” said Jeff Ubois, who is in the first camp and has organized conferences dedicated to personal archiving.
[…] Mr. Ubois said it’s hard to predict the future uses of what we save. Am I socking this away just for me, to reflect on my life as I age? Is it for my descendants? Is it for an artificial intelligence that will act as a memory prosthetic when I’m 90? And if so, does that A.I. really need to remember that I Googled “starbucks ice cream calorie count” one morning in January 2011?
Pre-internet, we pared down our collections to make them manageable. But now, we have metadata and advanced search techniques to sort through our lives: timestamps, geotags, object recognition. When I recently lost a close relative, I used the facial recognition feature in Apple Photos to unearth photos of him I’d forgotten I’d taken. I was glad to have them, but should I keep all the photos, even the unflattering ones?
Bob Clark, the director of archives at the Rockefeller Archive Center, said that the general rule of thumb in his profession is that less than 5 percent of the material in a collection is worth saving. He faulted the technology companies for offering too much storage space, eliminating the need for deliberating over what we keep.