Archiving and curation
Pruning, organized hoarding, warehouses, and other mysteries.
When we stare at paradoxes long enough, they can sometimes lose their mystery. When this happens to me, I take it as evidence that I know a little something about the topic.
Managing security on teams, for example, used to feel paradoxical. I wanted everyone to be able to collaborate and have access to all the files. But, also, I wanted to limit risk and I was very conservative about who had access to what. I wanted to give all the files to everyone; I wanted to give none of the files to anyone.
Now this tension just seems normal. The principle of least access and the principle of collaboration exist in a kind of creative tension with each other, and sometimes it bubbles up into a conflict. That’s okay. It’s an important and dynamic tension that fuels work. It animates and structures work. And it doesn’t seem paradoxical anymore.
Which brings me to archiving.
There’s so much about archival sciences that I don’t understand. I kind of get that pruning is an essential process for libraries and other archives. But the act of pruning still feels contradictory.
I think there’s probably a difference between hoarding and archiving. But what if we were just really organized hoarders? Perhaps organized hoarding is the real paradox here, lol.
The thing that makes me really wonder is how people can know in advance what is going to be of value. What stories will be told?
If we curate based on our current interests, we risk destroying the things that future people, even our future selves, are actually interested in.
I experience this problem with family photos all the time. The photos I found interesting thirty years ago, are no longer the photos, from that era, that I find interesting now.
And if I can’t reliably get this sorted out for my own family photos, how can we trust anyone with this responsibility for other things?
I’m being dramatic. But it does make me wonder.
How do we remember things, culturally? Is an archive just a warehouse with a nice index. What will matter? Is an archive really just a box of stories?