Jen Millea @ education.au

I have every letter that I have ever received. True. They live in a few big plastic storage containers under my bed - written on paper, by hand, or on typewriter. A few typed on a word processor and printed out and sent via snail mail. Letters from the time that Susan Campbell moved away in grade 3 and we used to write to each other. Letters from the pen pals I had in Canada, Italy, Germany and Ghana when I was 12. Cards for my birthday from friends I no longer remember. Letters, air letters, and postcards from father, mother, brother, boyfriends and best friends.
That was in the days before email, the internet and mobiles. Now, all I have are emails - 1 or 2 liners - or SMS’s or Twitters that without context mean next to nothing and which are read and then deleted forever, and may be as profound as ‘get mlk on way home, pls’.
This is not just a personal issue: the internet has created a giant gap in our ability to know and interpret the past as we move into the future. Stuff is on people’s personal email clients, or on corporate servers belonging to Yahoo and Google (and who knows where they will be in 1000 years). We have Facebook pages and MySpaces, nings and Sharepoints, corporate intranets and LinkedIn profiles - but we aren’t keeping our letters stored under the bed or in boxes in the shed for posterity.
The 2000-year-old Rosetta Stone may have enabled the unlocking of the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphics, but in the future there will be, perhaps, just one Mac Classic on which to run thousands of floppy disks found in some warehouse somewhere and perhaps only one person who can work out how to run the Classic only to find that the software needed to run the floppy is not on the computer. Where will our history go? How will we retrieve it? How will we be able to make sense of it?

At present historians can still go and sit in musty library reading rooms, or access digitised versions of primary materials via the internet. In a few hundred years it’s unlikely that much of our personal information will be retrievable. Perhaps there’ll be spotty bits and pieces here and there. But there are few people (are there any?) who print out their emails on paper and store them in folders or files. Where then go the books of letters written by famous people? Will their email be able to be accessed instead? Will they ruminate still or will their ‘letters’ be txt and emoticons. That may not matter for someone like me who is never likely to be famous, but Patrick White reduced to: 1 nbl prze woo hoo!

Archivists and national libraries who have the task of preserving our present so it can become our past have been aware of this issue for some time. There is no easy or neat way to undertake online archiving as the information has to be not only stored but retrievable which can mean maintaining and supporting ancient (in modern terms) computing equipment, superceded software and delivery mechanisms - and there’s so much of it. And further confounding issue is the disposability of information - into the recycling bin on the PC and gone forever.
Where once we may have been able to look at versions of book manuscripts in the collections of papers writers donate to libraries, to look at the crossings out and decision made to use this word over that, and come to know how a writer worked and thought and planned, now we may only ever have access to the penultimate version as the old versions are overwritten, deleted or lost on a memory stick somewhere at the bottom of a handbag in landfill.

The National Library of Australia has a major preservation project in Pandora - Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia. Pandora focuses on preserving websites and online publications of national interest. The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney has the Email Australia project. This project was a call to Australians to send in their ‘best’ emails to be archived for the future and provide a snapshot of life. A worthy project conceptually, but the examples on the website seem more focused on funny and quaint rather than thoughtful and profound - but perhaps that’s inherent in the way that we use email and other electronic communication methods.

Even with the supposed information overload, it could be that in a thousand years (assuming climate change doesn’t get us) historians only have access to a tiny portion of the current content as most is deleted, lost from servers owned by bankrupt or wound-up companies. A printed out email may have the same value then as the Rosetta Stone now.