The future of our past

I couldn’t believe what lay in my hand. A pocket-sized, government-issue notepad, the word Memoranda stamped innocuously—and ironically—on its black faux-leather cover. This ordinary memo pad had been on an extraordinary journey: riding in the breast pocket of Army Maj. Robert Furman, chief of foreign intelligence for the Manhattan Project, as he escorted the fissionable components of Little Boy to Tinian Island.

That was July 1945. Now it was 2015 or so, and my writing partner Sara Vladic and I were at the Library of Congress, hunting down records related to USS Indianapolis. I marveled at the memo pad. Seventy years before, it had been this close to the Hiroshima bomb. It was like holding history in my hand.

Sadly, historians writing 70 years from now about 2026 may never get such a chance. Because Furman used his notebook to jot personal—rather than mission-related—impressions, an archivist would classify it “ephemera”: everyday items such as receipts, tickets, and personal notes. Furman’s memo pad and other personal writings helped us tell not only the atomic bomb transport story, but what it was like to be Furman on this world-changing mission. But today, archivists are calling ephemera—and other records critical to preserving the distinctly human side of history—“endangered species.”

Archivists have warned for decades about what historian Roy Rosenzweig called “the future of our past.”

Among several reasons, two stand out.

First, 99% of all records are now “born digital,” according to the National Archives and other sources and have neither paper antecedent nor backup. That means treasures like Furman’s notebook are increasingly rare.

Second, many institutions have adopted a sorting tactic based on the “Pitt Project,” a landmark 1990s University of Pittsburgh research initiative for preserving electronic records.

Essentially, the project divided records into evidence and data/information. Evidence validates that something happened—a transaction, operation, report, event. But data/information is dynamic, manipulable, and created for day-to-day tasks. The Pitt rubric dismissed such material “as non-archival and unworthy of the archivist’s attention,” Rosenzweig wrote in American Historical Review in 2003. His example: The government’s record of your Social Security account is vital, but letters opposing Social Security privatization are not. “Thus, even as public and private institutions develop more sophisticated methods of preserving ‘official’ information, it is precisely the ‘unofficial’ information that balances—and often corrects—recorded history.”

Imagine a scribe applying the Pitt Project rubric in King David’s time, deciding whether each record was “history” worth preserving … or merely personal … ephemera:

Battle of the Valley of Rephaim After-Action Report—An important victory over the Philistines, the scribe thinks, and presses SAVE.

Census Records—Not the king’s best idea. Still … SAVE.

“The heavens declare the glory of God …” —Oh. The king wrote a poem. Who’s going to care about that? DELETE.

Scribes and archivists aren’t malign, just overwhelmed. The global “datasphere”—the total volume of digital data generated worldwide—will reach 221 zettabytes (ZB) this year, International Data Corporation reports. For context, one ZB equals 26 million Libraries of Congress in plain text.

Such growth has profoundly changed archivists’ game. Instead of “passive preservation,” they now face “active extinction.” That’s because the digital cosmos is notoriously fragile.

While paper can survive for centuries, digital records last only a decade or two at best. Archivists must wage a rolling battle against “bit rot”—file corruption and physical failure—and software obsolescence, even as they preserve new material.

Personal archives are also becoming far less “discoverable.” Seventy years from now, who will stumble upon important letters in great-grandma’s attic? She will likely have used email, her missives lost forever to the digital grave. Who will stumble upon our records, imprisoned as most are on laptops, smartphones, cloud services, and lapsed-subscription apps? (I plan to give my adult kids all my passwords.)

I fear most of us are irrationally optimistic that what matters will somehow survive. I also fear human history could turn increasingly sterile as archivists preserve records of what happened while neglecting records of what it was like to be there when it did.