This is not a pitting of print versus digital format, just musings on the future of information.  I recently wanted to dust off my Curriculum Vitae and make sure it was up-to-date, and remembered that I no longer had the most recent version.  As I recall, that version was on a floppy disk – the old large kind – and I no longer have such a disk drive and discarded the disk long ago.  Apparently I no longer have a hard copy either, or possibly never did because I never needed to print it out.  So I had to rely on my memory to reconstitute it and although I think I did okay, there are probably some details missing, a bit of my life that is no longer easily accessible.  All of this probably speaks more to the merits of having an “information team” than it does to the merits of any one class of information format or storage – people or systems to help me retrieve information.  Even if I had a hard copy, I don’t know if my filing methods would have made it easy to find the document.  I can’t remember if I checked the folder labeled “Stuff I have to keep indefinitely even though I don’t want to.”

I often wonder what the biographers of tomorrow are going to do about correspondence.  How will they know what kind of letter-writing habits their subjects had if it was all in email?  A year or so ago I was going through my old letters, preparing to dump them all in the recycling bin.  I like to get rid of stuff. The more I tossed, the more this dull feeling of loss crept over me, and finally I picked up the phone and called my sister, as I often do when I need somebody to tell me the obvious.  “You can’t throw them out” she said.  Hundreds of letters written while I was on the faculty and museum staff at a large midwestern university: letters to colleagues, friends, people wanting to borrow specimens, invite me to give talks, request help, students wanting to come and do research in my lab.  They were fun to read, and definitely of another era.  They will amuse somebody someday (not a biographer, of course, but at least my descendants will get a kick out of them).  I kept them.

A few nights ago I attended an alumni dinner and the speaker was the university librarian at my alma mater.  She talked about some of the extraordinary items in the university library’s holdings, including over 1000 letters from T. S. Eliot to his muse, Emily Hale.  The letters are wrapped in brown paper and the bundles encircled with a metal band, and they were given to the library by Miss Hale with the stipulation that they not be opened until January 1^st, 2020, by which time presumably anyone who could be offended by the contents would have passed on.  Eliot had burned all of her letters to him, but she, thankfully, could not bring herself to destroy his letters to her.  The library receives many pleas each year from Eliot scholars, each one with a unique reason why they should be allowed to look at the letters before the appointed date.  I’m sure the experience of looking at and (very carefully) handling these documents, penned between 1930 and 1956 by a Nobel laureate poet, will be an amazing experience.  Looking at email can’t possibly be anywhere near as thrilling.  Another item in the library’s collections is a copy of Paradise Lost that had belonged to Herman Melville, and its margins are crammed with Melville’s hand-written comments.  You certainly can’t do that to a Kindle.  In addition to the many digital documents and journals to which the university library has access, they still purchase 100,000 printed books – about a mile’s worth – every year.  I asked our speaker to tell me her thoughts about keeping up with digital format and storage, and she said that it is, obviously, a moving target, and anybody who says it’s simple is kidding themselves.

The digital age offers some freedom from paper, at least some kinds.  I like not getting bank statements in the mail, and I love being able to pay bills online, although the security of one’s information is a concern.  The more electronic bills I elect to receive, the more I worry about organization.  How do I keep track of it all?  Will the lack of paper make it more difficult to monitor trends in my water, gas and electricity usage, for example, or will it make it easier?  Am I more or less likely to notice errors in my bills?  I don’t actually feel like there is any less paper in my life these days, and the options for storage of my information do not seem any easier.  Oh, and don’t even get me started on photographs!  It’s great not to have all those prints to deal with, and big hulking photo albums, but what if I want to stroll down memory lane sometime?  What am I supposed to do with all these folders of photos on my computer?  I suppose I could look at them on our television with some kind of game system, but I confess that I don’t seem to be keeping up.  I think one has to have money to keep up, and I’d rather use my money to go abroad and study a language than spend it on electronic toys.  Did life used to be simpler?  Didn’t there used to be a lot fewer necessities than there are now?  Before cell phones and data plans, cable, Fios, Xbox Live subscriptions, Netflix, and so forth?

No, I don’t want to go back to the Old Days, not really.  Never has there been so much information available to so many as there is today, nor so many choices.  Granted, not all of it is as accessible as it should be (for example, PDFs of a number of papers I published are available online, and the research on which they are based was funded by federal grants – i.e., taxpayers’ money.  But you either have to pay for the PDFs or be associated with an academic institution in order to get at them.  Write to your congressperson about that, will you?).  It’s just amazing what is at one’s fingertips.  I just wish I knew the best way to organize it and keep it accessible, and whether the choices I make today will keep the information available far into the future. 

Additional reading: 

University Press Forum 2010: To E or Not to E, by R. A. Bartlett.  Choice, v.47, no. 09, May 2010