Do you date anything you write? These days computers automatically time stamp everything for us, so it’s not much of a consideration when you write an email, but what about that ephemera that swirls through your life? All those birthday cards, grocery lists, research notes, journal entries, stick figures on post-it notes?
It might not strike you as important to date those things, not with a full date like “January 15, 2009”, but you would think that someone who saved all of his papers throughout the course of his long academic career would think it’s important, if only because the fact that he bothered to save all of his papers indicates a belief that he thought someone might someday read them.
You would be wrong, wrong, WRONG.
We are currently processing the papers of Dr. Dexter Easton, who taught biology at FSU for decades and was a fairly important person in his field. The full collection came to nearly 70 banker’s boxes full of papers, including his notes from his own early academic career at Harvard all the way through his research notes and personal correspondence up to his death. The rather haphazard filing system he used (which translates roughly as “what filing system?”) makes sorting and documenting the collection difficult, but it is compounded by the fact that apparently Dr. Easton did not like to actually date anything he wrote down.
Keep in mind, I’m talking about hundreds if not thousands of pages of lab notes and analyses written by hand on everything from carbon paper to the back of departmental memos to, yes, paper napkins. No dates.
I found myself grateful for the onset of digital technology, because by about the mid-1980s, computer printouts began defaulting to putting a date somewhere on the page.
It’s made me sensitive to the things I have around me that I use to write on – notebooks and post-it notes and, yes, paper napkins. I’m just making life easier for some nameless archivist fifty years from now. Don’t judge me.
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