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WELCOME
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reminded me of a book review
I am late in submitting by a scholar who spent her graduate career at Yale,
took time off to confront the real world as a auto mechanic, and then got
down to basics to write a very good book on the influence of Small Pox
on American history which she called Pox Americana.
But I digress. The top of
the google hit list for "beyond the basics" was a site called : WWW: Beyond
the Basics. which is a draft book written by a class at Virginia Tech about
the World Wide Web . Just as I was getting interested in what the class
was about (I would recommend you spend some time at the site), a little
screen popped up asking me who was the lead singer of Nirvana? How
many know? I was given choices, Shannon Noon, Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix,
Ian Curtis, and Ed Papenfuse. I suppose you all know the answer,
Kurt Cobain, but I had to go back to Google to find out. There, I found
that my 87 year old father-in-law's heartthrob, Courtney Love, was once
Kurt Cobain's partner and that they had a child, Frances Bean.
It is easy to get distracted
on the web. It is almost as bad as archivists on Listservs. But permit
me to return to today's theme: Beyond the Basics, and to welcome you to
Maryland on an auspicious day: Patriots Day, April 19. In 1775, on this
day, the shot heard round the world was fired. In 1861, on this day, the
first blood of the Civil War was shed on Baltimore's streets as the Massachusetts
troops tried unsuccessfully to move unscathed from President's Street Station
to Pratt Street Station on their way to defend Washington. In 1995, tragedy
struck Oklahoma City. Subsequently, a memorial was built and web site launched
to keep the memories fresh of what happened that day, but, interestingly
enough, nothing on the web site tells you succinctly about what happened,
how it happened, and when it happened.
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Everything,
of course, that we remember about the importance of this day, is overshadowed
by another day in September, but the message is the same. As archivists
we are charged with keeping the the meaning of the collective memory alive
in world that is fast becoming almost too fragile for us to handle. Instead
of the tangible objects of paper and even more esoteric artifacts like
Jeremy Bentham's skull that we are called upon to care for and make known,
if not accessible, we face extraordinary challenges ahead with regard to
holding on to our knowledge of the past.
Last
fall, I had the privilege of addressing a group of archivists in the interior
of China. The metaphor that I used to conclude my remarks was drawn from
a poem that Chairman Mao copied in his unique style of calligraphy and
which is engraved on a stone monument at the entrance to a dark alley in
Nanjing named after the Confucian scholars that once lived there: The poem
is about the swallows nesting in the eaves of the rich who leave their
safe and secure world to create their nests in the eaves of the poor. The
information revolution, as manifested today in the World Wide Web, in many
ways is like the swallows spreading out into the countryside to nest in
the eaves of the citizenry at large.
More
people than ever can learn about what we have in our collections and what
it all means, but, like the mud and straw homes the swallows build, the
electronic world is fragile and easily destroyed. Still, as archivists
we must venture forth from the safe havens of the small and tactile collections
which largely form the basis of what you care for to the larger, darker
uncertain world of finding and maintaining the principal source of what
we know about ourselves today, tomorrow, and in the future: the electronic
information sources of today, ignoring the distractions, and focusing on
the essentials, building our little homes of clay and straw (known
(continued
on Page 3)
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