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For our final project for archiving we had to go through an unprocessed collection and write up an appraisal report. My group got the Jan Kerouac papers.
Can you imagine your life being reduced to a series of cartons, with people going through them, saying "tax forms ... medical receipts ... correspondences ... to-do lists and notebooks ... photographs ..." It's kinda surreal. I don't think it can ever really give a complete view of a person's life. I know if anyone got a hold of my journal - my paper journal, not this LJ - they would get a very fractured and skewed view of things. I've had this particular journal since 2001. It's not very thick, only about a half-inch of pages, and I'm not even halfway through it. I tend to only write in it when I'm particularly upset or bothered by something, and then not always. I go for months - years - without making an entry.
Of course, that's not all an archive is interested in. After they got over their disgust at seeing the state in which I kept my records, an archivist might actually find a few things of interest. There's all my drawings and sketches, of course. Print-outs of various iterations of various stories, some marked up, some clean. I so rarely throw anything away - but I so rarely keep anything in order, either. And of course, in this day and age, they'd have to take electronic records into account, too. My hard drive is much better organized than my house.
But there's also so much that simply doesn't ever get documented. No photographs, no letters, no lists, no videos. I can imagine watching from the "other side" and laughing as people tried to puzzle me out, knowing that they're simply missing the majority of the picture.
But then, maybe not. Our possessions can say more about us than we realize.
Can you imagine your life being reduced to a series of cartons, with people going through them, saying "tax forms ... medical receipts ... correspondences ... to-do lists and notebooks ... photographs ..." It's kinda surreal. I don't think it can ever really give a complete view of a person's life. I know if anyone got a hold of my journal - my paper journal, not this LJ - they would get a very fractured and skewed view of things. I've had this particular journal since 2001. It's not very thick, only about a half-inch of pages, and I'm not even halfway through it. I tend to only write in it when I'm particularly upset or bothered by something, and then not always. I go for months - years - without making an entry.
Of course, that's not all an archive is interested in. After they got over their disgust at seeing the state in which I kept my records, an archivist might actually find a few things of interest. There's all my drawings and sketches, of course. Print-outs of various iterations of various stories, some marked up, some clean. I so rarely throw anything away - but I so rarely keep anything in order, either. And of course, in this day and age, they'd have to take electronic records into account, too. My hard drive is much better organized than my house.
But there's also so much that simply doesn't ever get documented. No photographs, no letters, no lists, no videos. I can imagine watching from the "other side" and laughing as people tried to puzzle me out, knowing that they're simply missing the majority of the picture.
But then, maybe not. Our possessions can say more about us than we realize.