What to keep
I noticed a philosophical division among the archivists I spoke to. Digital archivists were determined to preserve everything with the mindset 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 cut corners to make an archive manageable for people who will be there in the future look into.
“It’s often very surprising what matters,” says Jeff Ubois, who is in the first camp and has organized conferences on personal filing.
He cited a historical example. During World War II, the British War Office asked people who had taken coastal holidays to send in their postcards and photographs, an intelligence-gathering exercise to map the coastline that led to the selection of Normandy as the best place to land troops .
Mr. Ubois said it’s hard to predict how we’ll use what we save in the future. Am I hiding this away just for myself, to reflect on my life as I get older? Is it for my descendants? Is it for an artificial intelligence that will act as a memory prosthesis when I’m 90? And if so, does that AI really need to remember that I googled “starbucks ice cream calorie count” one morning in January 2011?
Pre-internet, we reduced our collections to make them manageable. But now we have metadata and advanced search techniques to search our lives: timestamps, geotags, object recognition. When I recently lost a close family member, I used the facial recognition feature in Apple Photos to dig up photos of him that I forgot I’d taken. I was glad I had them, but should I keep all the photos, even the unflattering ones?
Bob Clark, director of archives at the Rockefeller Archive Center, said the general rule of thumb in his profession is that less than 5 percent of the material in a collection is worth preserving. He blamed the tech companies for providing too much storage space, so we didn’t have to think about what we keep.
“They made it so easy that they turned us into accidental data hoarders,” he said.
The companies occasionally try to play the role of memory miner, surfacing moments they think should be meaningful, probably with the aim of increasing my engagement with their platform or inspiring brand loyalty. But their algorithmic archivists inadvertently emphasize the value of human curation.
