I say a bit, because in some areas I’m quite good. I have a twelve year email archive that is still accessible and in regular use, and I migrated my Masters thesis (early 1990s) from an early word processing format on 5¼ inch discs. A copy is sitting on my laptop as I write.

But I last backed up contents of said laptop in February!

And worse, I have more than two years of certain aspects of my life invested in Flickr, and have yet to investigate ways of extracting all that data into a format I control and will be able to access in twenty years time.

Some while back I pondered the problem of archiving text messages. My solution, ultimately, was to photograph the particular messages of value to me. Where are those photos now? On Flickr and on my laptop…

Greater minds than mine Gunga Din have been thinking about these issues, and I leave you with this reference for now:

Paradigm: Workbook on Personal Digital Papers, Bodleian Library, 2007. (That’s the title of the web version. The hard copy version is Paradigm: Workbook on Personal Digital Archives, which, I think, is more meaningful.)

What constitutes a good memento of travel?

Kate Holden recently reflected on this in The Age (A2, 20 October 2007, p.3), noting that you can buy Vegemite and Tim Tams in London (so no point bearing these as gifts) and you can get most things in Australia, so what then is worth bringing home as a souvenir?

Photographs and vintage postcards she concludes. On her recent travels she happened upon ‘a cache of correspondence’ at a market in Rome, among a lot of vintage postcards. This series, written on standard issue postal stationery, represented a long correspondence in the life of an early twentieth century Italian family. What a find! Archivists and historians will immediately appreciate the significance.

And what did she do?

With regret, I chose five. Signore Mazza, I am very sorry to have broken up your correspondence. Perhaps I was wrong – but I also didn’t want to be selfish and take them all. The five are enough. Someone else will find the rest one day and never know what’s missing.

Aaaghh! The written life of everyday people is so much harder to find than that of the well-to-do. The archives of the everyday do not as commonly end up in archival and manuscript collections. They may be tossed out with the inevitable moves and clean outs that follow death. In this case, someone has realised the value to philatelists and postcard collectors and sold the lot to a dealer.

Holden continues, ‘I have mixed feelings about removing these photos and cards from their native lands – are they trophies or detritus, or have I saved them?’ Good question. If she hadn’t broken up the collection someone else would have, but perhaps not. Perhaps somebody might have bought the whole collection and offered it to a public collection in Italy where it would gain immeasurably in significance in its local context. Removed from their context and fractured like this they have become mere trophies. They haven’t been saved. That she cherishes them isn’t enough.

However, wince as I might about this story, I’m of a mind to agree with her about the value of the vintage postcard. Wandering the aisles of the Paris stamp bourse in 2003, I hunted for old postcards of Bordeaux, where I’d recently been researching for Blue Mauritius. I found several in pristine condition, never postally used. Propped up on my desk at home in Australia, they helped me to write (I hope) in a more evocative way about Bordeaux’s past.

I had no qualms (price paid excepted) in removing these from their homeland, because they had, almost a hundred years later, fulfilled their original purpose.

In the most recent installment in his Sunday Philosophy Club series, The Careful Use of Compliments (Little, Brown, 2007), the value of archives and the issue of appraisal is deftly and comically described… and initially disturbing at that!

Isabel Dalhousie, the main character, edits an academic journal on ethics and has done so for years. Recently informed that in spite of her success in turning the journal around she is to be replaced by Professor Dove, who requests the editorial archive be handed over to him, she warns him in writing that ‘I do not consider these archives to be anybody’s property but my own.’ The narrative continues:

What she had said about the ownership of the archive was probably wrong. Some of it belonged to her – the personal letters written to her as editor and the copies of letters which she had written, on paper which she had provided; those, she thought, were surely hers. (p.92)

Professor Dove duly arrives at Isabel’s place for the handover and Isabel explains:

‘When I took over the editorship,’ she said, ‘I threw out a lot of old files. There were boxes and boxes of papers which my predecessor had done nothing about sorting out. There were all sorts of things which would have been of no interest to anybody. Letters from the printers, and so on. I cleared it all out. There was even an ancient letter from Bertrand Russell about a claim for a train fare to a symposium that the Review had organised.’

Dove, who had been facing the window while Isabel spoke, now spun around. ‘Russell? But what about his biographers? What if they had wanted it?’

Dove’s tone was one of subdued outrage, and Isabel bristled defensively. ‘Would his biographers be interested in a claim for a train fare? Surely not, unless Russell questioned the reality of the train journey, or something like that. I think that I boarded a train at Paddington, but can I be sure?’ She laughed, but Dove did not; he was concerned with posterity, and could not laugh at such things. Isabel wondered what conclusion biographers might draw from such a letter: that Russell was always one to claim expenses? Or that his finances were not in a good state and that he needed to watch even very minor outlays? (pp.135-6)

Isabel is given to these flights of philosophy, but more than anything she is annoyed at the manner in which her downfall has been plotted: her attitude to the archive is tied up in this. But I felt a pang that a favourite character (and the author no doubt) could apparently trivialise the idea of the archive. She knows her idea about the ownership is probably wrong, and her dilemma about the division of personal/professional in the archive is interesting.

As a researcher first however, I blenched at her cavalier statement of appraisal and disposal (‘I threw out a lot of old files’) and like Dove (described in the blurb as machiavellian) find myself slightly more concerned with posterity.

Delightfully however, McCall Smith brings this to the point some forty pages later, when Isabel is trying to track down the identity of a man who stayed at a guesthouse and asks the proprietor to check his register for an address (let’s not consider the ethics of that):

Rob looked through the papers again. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘We would have known at the time, but we weed out the old letters. We don’t keep them.’

‘A pity,’ muttered Isabel. She thought of her conversation with Christopher Dove: it was exactly what she had done with the old correspondence of the Review of Applied Ethics. She was one to talk. (p.177)

So, has Alexander McCall Smith the right attitude to archives? I’m sure if asked to elaborate on this point, he’d make an interesting keynote speaker at an archival conference!