Preservation

While thinking about this weeks question of preservation, it is hard not to think back to the times I have lost countless important videos, photos, and papers after various computer crashes. As someone who grew up in the 1990’s and early 2000’s I had, which I’m sure a lot of you have, the  extremely frustrating experiences of going through various technological advancements in a short period of time. A lot of my grade school and high school memories exist within cassette tapes, VHS, boxes of magazines/books/zines, CD’s, DVD’s, photo albums, and hundreds of vinyl records. I remember starting to transfer music from cd’s onto one of my first computers about ten years ago, along with photos from my digital camera, and papers I wrote for school. Of course this being my first lap top I backed nothing up and lost photos I had deleted of my camera, papers that had been thrown out, and music on CD’s that I longer had. It was then that it became clear how quickly some of the most important things in the history of your life can be destroyed if they are not preserved properly. However, it is hard to determine the best way to preserve documents and items because as technology advances more and more of it becomes obsolete.

I can honestly say I have never truly trusted digital preservation fully after that devastating loss of data, nor do I necessarily enjoy reading digitally preserved books online or clicking through digital pictures on a screen. I do however recognize the importance of it and the doors it opens to accessibility.

That being said I have attached a video of the vintage collection archivist, Bill Bonner, from the National Geographic, which I thought illustrates the importance of preservation from not only the digital side but from the objects side as well. Plus I thought it was a pretty interesting example of an archives and really nothing beats the feeling you get when you have the chance to look at an original book or photograph that has been preserved.