On Keeping Archives
I've been thinking about archiving again. Not in the grand institutional sense — not the Library of Congress or the Internet Archive, though I admire both — but in the small, personal, unglamorous sense. The kind of archiving that happens in folders on external drives, in filing cabinets that haven't been opened in years, in boxes of paper that sit in a closet and haven't been opened in years.
For most of my working life, some version of organizing other people's materials has been part of what I do. I've called it different things at different times. Media archiving. Document processing. Digital preservation consulting, once, for a contract that lasted about four months and paid better than it should have. The work itself is always more or less the same: take a pile of stuff that exists in one format, assess what matters, and put it somewhere more durable and findable.
The part that most people don't appreciate is how much of archiving is decision-making. Every folder you create implies a taxonomy. Every file you rename is an editorial choice. When you decide that this document goes in "correspondence" rather than "legal" or "personal," you're imposing a structure that will shape how someone encounters that material later — including your future self, who will have forgotten why you made that choice.
I've been involved in a few small digitization projects over the years, and the pattern is always the same. Someone has a collection of materials — tapes, papers, photographs, whatever — and they want it "digitized." They imagine this is a mechanical process: scan the thing, save the file, done. But the real work is everything around the scanning. What resolution? What format? What metadata do you attach? How do you name the files? Where do they live? Who has access? What happens when the hard drive fails?
These aren't technical questions so much as philosophical ones dressed up in technical clothing. They're really asking: what do we value enough to keep, and how do we ensure it survives?
I don't have great answers. I've seen projects where someone spent months carefully organizing a collection, only to have it become inaccessible when the software they used to catalog it was discontinued. I've seen other projects where someone just dumped everything into a folder called "archive" with no organization whatsoever, and somehow that worked fine for years because the person who needed the files knew what they were looking for.
The lesson I keep learning is that the best archival system is the one you'll actually maintain. Elaborate taxonomies are worthless if you abandon them after two weeks. A flat folder of files with good names will outlast a beautifully structured database that depends on a specific application to access.
I've been working on my own files lately. Going through old project folders, cleaning up names, throwing out duplicates. It's the kind of task that feels productive without actually accomplishing much in any visible way. Nobody is going to thank me for renaming a batch of PDFs. But there's a quiet satisfaction in it, the same kind you get from organizing a toolbox or cleaning out a garage. The materials themselves aren't important. The act of caring for them is.
I suppose that's why I keep doing this kind of work, even when it doesn't pay well or at all. There's something about the practice of tending to information — deciding what to keep, what to present, how to frame it — that appeals to a certain kind of temperament. You learn to curate not just files but the version of yourself that the files describe. If you're reading this and nodding along, you probably have it too.
I'll write more about specific tools and workflows in future posts, maybe. For now I just wanted to put down some general thoughts. It's been on my mind.
— Kevin V.