One of the things I have to do in my new role volunteering as president of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility is clean out the 25-year-old organization’s archives. Our little office in San Francisco’s awesome Nonprofit Tech Center can’t hold all our history, and so I’m in the process of negotiating with a very cool university library that wants to acquire our papers and keep them in good condition so that generations of researchers can learn about what CPSR did to protest SDI (Star Wars) weapons systems.

In the process of going through 30 boxes and 9 filing cabinets of our papers — with help from the excellent library nerds Steven Black, Sacha Arnold, Rick Prelinger, Megan Shaw Prelinger, and Gina DeVries — I’ve gained a new appreciation for paper archives. While I want to digitize as much of CPSR’s history as possible, I also want a paper audit trail as it were. Too often, tech geeks like myself place too much faith in the longevity of digital storage. But in fact, history is still going to be remembered via paper most of the time. Read more about my adventures in the CPSR archives, and why I think every digital archive needs a paper backup copy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 10:44 am.
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