When a blog becomes a book.
September 01, 2016
Technologies change. I like to think of this blog as an eternal resource, but that's probably foolish. While it seems that for now online sources have been able to store information while updating their capabilities, who knows what can happen to any given blog, or any types of technologies?
In a recent Facebook conversation on this topic, my friend Andrea Humphrey said this:
"On a class tour of the Schlesinger Library in the 90's, an archivist was showing us boxes of Dorothy West's letters and articles. I suggested that archivists would be relieved when all the archives come to them on space-saving floppies. She said, 'quite the opposite. the technology required for humans to read hard copies will never change," but with the fast high tech innovation cycles and also the ways in which digital archives on discs disintegrate compared to on paper, they were dreading the enormous loss of important historical artifacts that can now occur before we even know whether they are important."
The technology required for humans to read hard copies will never change.
I love that! And how nice it is to hold a book in your hands. The reading experience is so different. And how much easier for a brick and mortar archive to put an actual book on the shelf. So now the born-digital posts I've written are in a book. Just one copy, for now, for my own archive. In the future, we'll see. It will probably end up at The Schlesinger Library, too.
If you blog, you might want to try this. I used a service called Into Real Pages. Very easy to use. There are others. It was not inexpensive, but the result is priceless.