Why preserve information? (Does it go bad?)

Information is preserved for a number or reasons - historical value, future reference, public and/or personal interest, and economic value to mention but a few. In order to better understand the nature of why people preserve information I will take a brief look at some of these reasons in a little more detail.

Historical value and future reference:

History is important to the future, and to the present, but in order to understand history we need to be able to examine it in some detail, the process of which is called historiography. Historiography is defined in the Encyclopedia Britannica as follows:

" The writing of history, especially the writing of history based on the critical examination of sources, the selection of particulars from the authentic materials in those sources, and the synthesis of those particulars into a narrative that will stand the test of critical methods."

A very important clause in that definition is "Critical examination of sources". How can we examine historical sources if none now survive? How can we determine which sources are authentic if we cannot examine them? Only though the preservation of the information of the past can we examine it critically, and only through proper interpretation can we make and informed opinion of it's lessons. As John Arnold describes in his book "History: a very short introduction" history has been interpreted differently throughout the ages, sometimes in an attempt to more 'accurate' and sometimes in an attempt to conform to popular views, disregarding fact for a more 'appropriate' interpretation.

By it's nature, once the original source of any given piece of information is lost it can never be re-created. Interpretations of the original may be used to try to recreate what was lost, but how can anyone be certain that what they have extrapolated from these interpretations has anything to do with the actual original information? Thus it is important to preserve original forms of information if we wish to be able to rely on it in the future for critical analysis.

Public or Personal interest:

How many times have you found some useful tidbit of information while doing research only to never be able to find it again in the future? I know that I have, on a number of occasions, found some very interesting bits of information, either in print or electronic form, only to search in vain the next time I attempted to find it again. Some forms of information, especially information that is non-academic, sometimes appears to be so ephemeral as to have a lifespan of but a single access! This seems to be especially so when it involves Internet-based information.

Blogs, personal web pages, non-academic online articles, and even conversations in public forums all tend to be very short lived because with few exceptions they are not designed with preservation in mind. Some resources do exist to preserve these more ephemeral forms of information, like the "Internet Way Back Machine" and the Internet archives at the New Library of Alexandria, Egypt. These sites specifically state in their F.A.Q. pages that anyone not wishing to have their information recorded may exclude it from these archives, and coupled with the incalculably enormous volume of content currently in existence on the Internet, these utilities cannot be totally comprehensive.

In 2007 there were over 100 million web sites in existence on the Internet worldwide, up from 18,000 sites in 1995 (Foster, 2007). As the expansive growth of electronic information continues it is becoming more and more important to find ways to preserve this information for the future.


Works cited:

Arnold, J. (2000). History: A very short introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Foster, A. (2007). Information Navigation 101. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 53 (27). A38-40.

Historiography. (2008). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved May 16, 2008, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online: http://search.eb.com/eb/article-9108622