Keeping stuff: How to preserve course papers despite technological change

Papers and pencils

Here is a page from the first written work I turned in as an undergraduate, on October 3, 1968 -- a set of solutions to problems in arithmetic and algebra. I wrote it in pencil, almost certainly a ``number 2'' pencil, on medium-weight, narrow-ruled paper designed for a three-ring binder. In those days, I had no aesthetic sense at all, so the layout is ugly and difficult to parse.

I used pencil so that I could revise my work as I wrote. On the original, one can make out several erasures. The alternative would have been to write a draft in pencil, revising as necessary, and then to make a fair copy in ink to turn in. It did not even occur to me then to do such a thing, nor would I have had the patience to write up the copy correctly, or the discipline to refrain from trying to make additional revisions in the fair copy.

This technology of paper and pencil is consistent with preservation over the lifetime of the author, which is what I'll be most concerned with today. The pencil marks haven't faded or smeared into illegibility. The paper, white in 1968, is now slightly yellowish-brown, but even so it is easy to make out the text, even the small subscripts. Everything that I could do with the text in 1968, I can still do -- number 2 pencils and erasers are still available, for example. But now I can do more: I can make copies very cheaply, I can use a scanner to store an image of the page in a computer file, and I can publish and distribute that image on the World Wide Web. So this is a technological success story: This unprepossessing document is now, in one sense, far more usable than it was when I created it, because I can do more with it.