Importance of Archiving

Right, consider this. All modern and advanced nations have a national archive, and their various districts and states have their own resource center of old file, documents, photographs, sound files and videos etc. A collection of artifacts in short.

However, it is a very lacking culture in Malaysia, not least at the grassroots level. Yes, we have a National Archive, but how many actually know what it is, let alone where it is? Arkib Negara, Jalan Duta main branch, Google it.

Let's first take a look at the few famous examples of archives. The American Congressional Library, Harvard and MIT's libraries, a presidential library for each outgoing American library, Google etc.

What's so important about archiving?

POLITICS

Obama is 44^th president of USA. All big publications want to dig up facts about him, where to go to?

Academicians and historians want to know about the voting record of a politician, see what is his stand on things, where to go to?

We want to know what was Anwar's stand on vernacular education, back when he was in Deputy PM and compare it to now, see if he is a chameleon because he wants to please the crowds and win popularity or if he has been consistent in his stands. Where to go to?

We want to know what role Najib, our prospective PM in three months, played in the 513 riots. Did he fan the flames of racial tensions? Where to go to?

We want to know how Mahathir rescued the Malaysian economy from potentially hitting 231 million percent inflation rate (Zimbabwe). Where to go to?

 

SCIENCE

Pluto was downgraded into not becoming a planet anymore. How was it done? Astronomer, Mike Brown was doing field research to find larger bodies out there in space. He had a telescope take pictures of the same piece of the sky at alternate periods of time, say every two hours. Then when they were stored in his computer, he compared them to find a difference in the skies, i.e. a difference in the brightness of a light source, or the different sizes of a blinking light source. When he did find something that he thought to be of importance to his field of study, which was basically a huge chunk of mass, he then had to figure out its period. (The Earth's period about the Sun is a year.) Now these bodies took a long time to change their locations, say ten to twenty years to move the distance of a millimeter! He couldn't wait so long to figure it out, for very practical reasons. So what did he do? Go back to the archives and look for photographs of the shining mass in the sky for as long back as they could and generally compare them to each other and calculate the path it took from say 30 years back to today, and hence, you could get the whole period of the mass! So, once again, where to go?

 

GENERAL

You have Facebook? You have Photobucket? You have Friendster? You have photo albums? Then you're keeping an archive of your photographs, that you'll cherish ten years from now.

You parents have love letters from back then when they started courting each other? You have yourself an archive of your parent's romantic history.

You backup your computer files? Why?

 

SIGNIFICANCE

Humans are beings of stories. We watch movies, read newspapers, story books and even listen to song lyrics because they have a story to them. Archives that are well maintained and that keep key artifacts will tell a great story for our kids and grandkids and generations to come.

We are a race that builds our future on the achievements of the past. As Newton put it, he was successful for he had stood on the shoulders of giants. And although these giants were dead, their work was archived in the form of paper or drawings, and we, the future generation could tap on these resources. So now, we don't have to derive calculus from its foundations all over again, we just have to apply the methods to everyday problems.

Humans are but mortals. Our memories will fade and we will die. So what happens when I leave this world? Do my knowledge, experience and ideas have to follow me to the grave? Can my friends and family and colleagues not know what I had done or thought in my lifetime? Will my grandkids not know what I had gone through to get to where I am? Will the next generation not know about my wife and our romance? Yes, if there were no archiving of any form.

The importance of history is learning about it and not repeating the blunders and mistakes that people before us made. It means learning from previous mistakes and emulating past successes. It means a shorter but more prepared journey. It means saved resources and increased efficiency.

 

So, start archiving today. Archiving does not mean keeping EVERYTHING! It means keeping key things, like your first movie tickets with a girl you cherish, like your test results, good or bad, which motivated you to study hard, like meeting minutes, like the historical issue of TIME when the first black president of USA was elected.

 

START ARCHIVING TODAY!