I’ve been asked to speak at Si Gerson’s memorial on Friday. In order to dig a little deeper into the Stanley Isaacs controversy and the Cacchione succession fight, I paid a visit to the Tamiment Library at NYU in order to look through Si’s personal files. The library has not yet had the opportunity to catalogue and file the 15 boxes of files that were donated this Spring, a few months after Si’s passing. Amazingly, I was able to find the files I was looking for quickly and easily.
Like most lefties with a long view, Si kept files for his own reference and for posterity. It’s all filed away by content type (articles, photographs, correspondence) and by subject. He’s got incoming and outgoing correspondence, thanks to the modern miracle of carbon paper. I recall corresponding with Si over CoFOE matters and thinking his typewritten, carbon-copied letters were anachronistic in the internet age. But, then, those letters were easily located, neatly filed away at the Tamiment library, and it’s made me worry about my own archives.
I’ve got so little saved on paper. I’ve regularly forwarded my files to Steve Rossignol, the Socialist Party’s archivist, who passes on material that becomes old enough to Duke University, but most of my files are on computer hard disk. I’ve managed to transfer files from hard drive to hard drive for about eight years now, but some hard drives have gotten lost along the way.
I have kept my computer files in a reasonable order (Free advice: incorporate the date, subject and recipient into the file name – such as 050211newsday_walmart.doc for a letter to Newsday regarding Wal-Mart written on February 11, 2005 – How else are you gonna keep all those Wal-Mart files straight over the years?), but hard drives fail and file formats change. Who’s to say any of this binary code gibberish will have any meaning sixty years hence?
More immediately, I’m concerned about the bulk of my correspondence, which is via e-mail. Beginning in 1998, I began saving incoming e-mails that I deemed important. In 2002, I began saving all outgoing e-mail, and in 2003, I began saving all incoming e-mail that wasn’t about Rolex watches, bigger penises, larger cumloads and moms I’d like to fuck.
The problem with saving e-mail is that you can’t really save it as discrete files (unless you’re completely anal and spend so much time filing correspondence that you don’t actually live a life worth documenting). It just gets saved as a big blob of a file that is forever associated with your e-mail program. For many years, my e-mail program of choice was Netscape, until buggy crashes and a huge archive of saved mail made it my program of no-choice. I’ve recently switched to Thunderbird, but almost wish I hadn’t. No e-mail program worth a damn seems to be able to import these files, and no program seems to be able to properly save and store my correspondence archives.
I’m seriously thinking about buying some carbon paper and dusting off an old typewriter, just like Si would have done.
I really like the searching capabilities of Spotlight in Mac 10.4.x. I think that it may cause folks to rethink how they do folders etc., although I still like the traditional approach.
I don’t do as good a job of backing up as I should, but do try to keep a copy of the really important stuff on my ISP’s server. They do a tape back up every night. JH