Another poll has closed and thanks to all who have voted. In this case, the majority lost. According to the National Archives, "Of all documents and materials created in the course of business conducted by the Federal Government, only 1%-3% are so important for legal or historical reasons that they are kept by us forever." (National Archives, 2008). Frankly, I was really surprised with this statistic. As mentioned in a previous post, the National Archive contains over 6 billion pieces of paper in the Washington archive alone. Think about all the billions of pieces of paper that didn't make the cut. What an overwhelming job the archivist must have deciding what to keep! I thought about this in terms of my own personal office. How much paper do I personally archive? Are my documents really more important than those generated by the government? Do I need to save more than 1%-3% for legal or other purposes? I decided, probably not. So, off to purge I go. If the national archivist can do it, so can I. Can you?
National Archives. (2008). About the National Archives. Retrived on April 10, 2008, from http://www.archives.gov/about/
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3 comments:
Emotionally, I feel like it is important to keep all my documents. I know that I personally archive a lot of paper. I try to purge my unnecessary documents. The only problem is that in my mind all of my documents are necessary. My solution is to purge the print copies of my documents. Then, I turn around and save all my papers on a flash drive.
I would think it would take a certain kind of person to be an archivist. You have to know the value of things, but not be in the mindset of keeping everything. I don't know what guidelines exist or if there are none, but I would think that would be helpful to standardization.
Bridget makes an interesting point. I would previously had thought that an archivist’s job was to, well, save. Everything. But anyone could do that. The hard part must be determining what to save.
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