Memory loss?

So, last night I got out of class early. What to do? I didn’t really feel like going straight home, so I met a friend for a beer. Finding this out of the way place we settled in and before long these people sat down next to us. As usual at bars (especially out of the way ones on Tuesday nights) we all got to talking. This one guy, turns out, was a collector of old movie reels. Really old ones. He told us that many of them were in either disrepair or beyond repair. First question out of my mouth was “do you plan to digitize any of them?” Hmmph. So this class has affected the way I think about things. He told me he has not, but he has sold a few to some art school in Sweden (for big bucks). I can almost guarantee that they will (digitize them) and will the movies will somehow show up in some art student’s project. Interesting.

This of course leads to the importance of digital preservation. Once things are lost, they are lost forever. So even though i spend a lot of time in this class whining about how much i like books, or how authorities have to have the last word, I really believe that it is imperative to save the past and if the only way to do that is to get things digitized, then I am all for it. The readings (Cohen and Rosenzweig) spent a fair amount of time espousing that historians have to get on the same page as archivists, librarians, and computer scientists. They really do in this case. I know that there are a lot of “old” historians out there that are not willing/able to get on board with the digital age, however, there’s a new breed coming out (us) that are. This, like everything else will not be an easy task. The same problems arise in these cases as with all problems in the humanities: money, time, resources, bodies. There are also other problems, as well. Here we get into ownership, copyright laws, authenticity, and finally, the actual preservation of documents/media. Seems to me, though, that there’s enough hoopla, and enough people that believe in this ‘new’ form of preservation that it might catch on, on a grand scale. Hopefully resources will become available (with our shiny new administration-sorry, Chip) and we can avoid large chunks of memory loss.

i wish…

that my grandfather talked about his experiences in WWII. I know that he received a purple heart and that his leg was a little bumpy due to the schrapnel that resided there. But that’s it. He died in 1997. He never told my dad, my grandmother, or any of my aunts and uncles. Nobody knows. All we know is that he was a really cranky old guy. *sigh* So for me, oral histories could help me to understand what he went through without actually knowing what he went through. Get it?

Although oral histories might not meet all the criteria of IRBs or research standards, one thing holds true (for me)… from a social or humanistic approach they could uncover the true ‘emotions’ of the people who were actually in the situations. Standards aside, is there a better primary source?