❧ The Paper Trail

When I die, I’ll leave behind a lot of journals and notebooks. These will, of course, be of interest to my immediate family, but they won’t exactly be great leisure reading; they probably won’t even make for good “inspirational” reading either (not without heavy editing, at least). The only obvious choice is to either keep them in a box in the attic, or eventually throw them out.

There ought to be a third choice. Even the most mundane journal has great value simply because it contains an incredible amount of historical information into current thinking, lifestyle habits, values, and events, things which change wildly over long time periods.

On the receiving end, suppose you inherit your great-grandfather’s journal; he has been dead for decades and you never knew him personally, but he fought in WWI. If you can find the time, you pore over it for an hour or two, deciphering the handwriting and gleaning some very interesting information and perspectives. What happens after that?

I have an idea that there should be a public repository for things like this. You could send in your great-grandfather’s journal for use by future historians. They would digitize or transcribe it, analyze it, and tag it with metadata about who wrote it, when they wrote it, and generally what topics they wrote about. They could allow you to specify that it must remain private until a specified date, and provide you with a digital copy, or even a nice hard copy if you wanted to pay a little extra.

This would give researchers a huge resource to draw upon, and allow the actual, historical value of old journals (beyond that of sentimental value) to be realized without compromising anyone’s privacy.