Been cleaning out my closet and files this week while getting ready for the semester.
Looking at administrative materials, correspondence and so on that I kept from 1992-1995, when I had my first academic jobs at Rutgers, Emory and then here at Swarthmore. And wow, but that stuff looks ancient. There were print-outs from administrative computer records that still had the guidestrips with holes in them and were made by really crude looking dot-matrix printers. Yellow legal pads with notes I took in 1994 where the paper itself has completely faded and looks like it came from fifty years ago. And though everybody and his brother likes to observe that the “paperless” office is anything but paperless, I was still amazed to see again the much larger range of paper notices of various kinds that were fetching up in my campus mailboxes. (I found a cross-section of junkish mail from 1996 that I evidently just dumped into a pile and stuck in my closet once I got all the stuff I was sure I needed out of it.)
I was filing more dutifully and indiscriminately at that point, too, and I have to say that I’m struggling to recall what on earth I was thinking when I saved some of this stuff. I kept craploads of book and film catalogs from 1995. What, did I think I was going to be ordering out of them in 2006? I kept routine circulars. Notices of events that I wasn’t involved in and didn’t attend. The pink cards we get from the Registrar when students withdraw from classes. (Yes, I should have kept them for that semester, but seriously, was I imagining that I was going to need to find old pink cards from courses in 1997 ten years later in order to cross-check an enrollment issue?)
Not that my current filing system, aka, Make Big Piles on Desk, is vastly superior. But it really struck me that you can seriously underestimate how much change there can be the technical details of work when the overall kind of work you do hasn’t changed much.
There were print-outs from administrative computer records that still had the guidestrips with holes in them and were made by really crude looking dot-matrix printers.
We still get those, at least for our student evaluation results. God help us when the ribbon runs out….
“A pile for everything and everything in its pile” my father always said. “When the piles run together, it’s time to clean”
I kept craploads of book and film catalogs from 1995. What, did I think I was going to be ordering out of them in 2006? . . .
I understand. I tossed out a lot of stuff the last time I moved, but I suspect I’d still be rather horrified at what’s sticking around in my file cabinets. OTOH I’ve still got hardcopy notes dating from the era before I owned a PC. And, since my first PC was a Z80 machine, I’ve either got hardcopy printouts of notes from that era, or zilch, depending.
That’s another painful layer I’m digging into now. I kept my dissertation notes in a HyperCard database that I made myself, which naturally turned out to be quite difficult to export into any usable form. So I printed the whole thing and glued the entries onto index cards as well.
Hypercard! I still keep it around on my Mac, because I’ve got stuff in there that isn’t anywhere else.
“What, did I think I was going to be ordering out of them in 2006? I kept routine circulars. Notices of events that I wasn’t involved in and didn’t attend. The pink cards we get from the Registrar when students withdraw from classes. (Yes, I should have kept them for that semester, but seriously, was I imagining that I was going to need to find old pink cards from courses in 1997 ten years later in order to cross-check an enrollment issue?)”
It’s the historian’s self-interested impulse, I think, to archive these sorts of things. To collect ephemera that may shed light at some future date about what your day-to-day life was like at some point in the past. I say this as a historian myself, and I unconsciously (and, admittedly, sometimes consciously) do this all the time.
Yes, I think that’s a lot of it, especially since I know that ephemera are often my favorite materials to work with as a historian. Since as a historian, I know that I often value documents and materials that contemporaries thought were irrelevant or unimportant, I’m conscious that I might be wrong about what I want to look at myself in my own paper trail. I think most of my colleagues are like this–we absolutely HATE it when the library calls us and wants to de-accession books, because it’s just when things get old and seemingly irrelevant that we know a new project for a historian has come into being. Everyone else wants to throw out old textbooks, or old technical materials, for example, but all I can think is, “Oh my god, all that precious archival material for some future intellectual or institutional history! You can’t!!!”