The Changing Nature of Filing

Every so often I go through my files to purge them of things I no longer need. Of all the things I've discarded I've only regretted throwing out one, a collection of cartoons I drew while in junior high and high school. This week I started another file purge sparked by rediscovering my Evernote account.

I first signed up for Evernote to track some online research I was doing. Eventually I finished that project and moved on. I found my Dropbox account much more useful for the kind of document storage and work I have been doing. When I got my new computer last month I stumbled upon an Evernote app and decided to take a look at it again. I poked around the internet to see what folks had to say about Evernote. One of the thing I learned was that the smart phone version has the ability to act as a scanner to import documents. So I started going through my file drawers.

The first thing I did was scan several pages of notes from a small notebook I kept when we were creating Renaissance Faire characters. There's a lot of good information there, but it has been a while since we've worked on that project. I now use the notebook for other miscellaneous research, but I don't want to discard the old research. Using my phone, I scanned them into notes and sorted them for future reference. Then I pulled a folder from the file drawers labeled "Cormorant". It contained a lot of my early notes, maps, city plans, genealogies, etc. for a world that serves as the setting for bits and pieces of short fiction that I write now and then. A lot of my concepts and ideas have evolved over the years, and some of the projects sparked by that research (my constructed languages, for instance) are kept in other places. Again there's good information that I don't want to discard at this stage, but I also haven't looked in the folder for a long time. So I scanned and sorted the contents into Evernote notes.

When I got to the last documents I found this 5 1/4" Minidisk between a couple of them. Its slip envelope also contained a folded sheet of paper with a list of document names. Some of them were obviously stored copies of some of the documents in the folder. A couple were from the early years of the Connecticut Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights. Some of the document names made no sense to me at all but obviously meant something when I created the list nearly a quarter of a century ago.

 These minidisks were an improvement over the 10" disks used by the Wang system, but they were supplanted by the even smaller 3 1/2" disks. It's difficult to retrieve information from all three of those old floppy disks. (Yes, we called the 3 1/2" disks floppy even though they weren't.) Then came CDs followed by flash drives. Now we're storing stuff on the Cloud. How long will it be before we have to move that information or run the risk of not being able to access it?

And our archiving systems haven't yet caught up with the new technology. Many institutions are still trying to develop systems and protocols for archiving email and the myriad of elecotronic documents that are sitting on our hard drives and online places like Goggle Docs. In 100 years will historians have access to technology that will be capable of opening the myriad of electronic data created in the late 20th and early 21st centuries? Or will they be as inaccessible as the documents on my minidisk?

Microfilm or microfiche anyone?