Journals, letters, I’ve loved you: an accounting of archives, history and digitalization

letter from Thomas Jefferson

Archives: a place that stores primary sources

like letters, reports, notes and photographs.

Archivists: people who know their collections

and can direct researchers to relevant materials.

Starting in 1983, I taught writing for six years at South Boston High, the school that became famous in the 1970s over court-ordered desegregation of the Boston Public Schools. My students had the lowest literacy rates in Massachusetts, and the most dynamic voices I’d ever heard. I published their autobiographical stories and photographs in an annual magazine called Mosaic, which the City’s public schools used as texts for Reading & Writing and ESL classes.

            One day, when Zobeida Garcia told me that she was failing biology, I told her to meet me after school at a quarter-to-three. We could do her homework together.

            But Zobeida didn’t show up.

            The next day, I asked her, “What happened? You said you’d come to my office at a quarter-to-three.”

            “I don’t know that time,” she smiled sweetly. “I only know digital.”

            This was 1986.

How on Earth, I wondered, would this girl survive?

            The cluelessness, it turns out, was on me.

In 2006, while working on my first will, I called the director of a small women’s archives. She had sent me a handwritten note about how much she enjoyed my novel about four generations of mothers and daughters. I offered to designate my journals and correspondence to her archives.

            “Are your papers digitalized?” this woman asked.

            “No,” I said proudly. “I write by hand.”

            “In that case,” she said, “I can’t use them.”

I called The Schlessinger at Radcliffe College, the world’s largest women’s archives. I soon had a contract stating that when I die, my survivors will send my papers to The Schlessinger.

            Dandy. While my stack of boxes grew—I write about ten journals and a thick file of correspondence every year—I had one less thing to think about.

I did notice troubles in the archival world. In 2006, my mother-in-law (a columnist at the Grand Junction Sentinel) moved from Colorado’s Western Slope to Carlsbad, New Mexico, and asked me to find a place for her papers. I called an archivist at a Colorado university. He could not use her materials, but he had plenty to tell me: If something’s altered on paper—i.e., George W. Bush’s VietNam war service—anyone can see the white-out or the erasure mark. With digitalization, no one can see the changes. If you scan papers onto a CD—or some other hardware, within ten years, the hardware (and its contents) will disintegrate. At The Library of Congress, two computers can play its collection of oral history interviews with VietNam vets; but only one person knows how to repair those computers, and he just retired.

“You’re a writer!” this archivist screamed. “You have to do something!”  

            I had no idea what to do.

Neither did Paul Brodeur, an investigative reporter at The New Yorker for nearly 40 years. Brodeur wrote about the dangers of things like asbestos and electromagnetic radiation. His 1977 book, The Zapping of America, reported that “Microwave radiation can blind you, alter your behavior, cause genetic damage, even kill you. The risks have been hidden from you by the Pentagon, the State Department and the electronics industry.”

In 1992, Brodeur gave his papers to the New York Public Library. Five years later, he toured the Library’s underground vault containing 42 miles of movable shelves. He saw his papers, designated part of the Library’s permanent collection.

In April, 2010, the Library’s new curator wrote Brodeur. Because of “diminishing resources, including space,” the Library had not “retained” Brodeur’s papers. (Somebody had dumped them.)

            Brodeur nor the curator who acquired his papers knew what to do—or how to protect other papers from a similar fate.

My research and writing continued to depend on librarians’ help. When African women asked me to describe how the menstrual cycle was affected by female genital mutilation (FGM)—even though I knew nothing about the subject—I called my local hospital’s librarian. Within the week, he handed me a two-inch stack of papers about FGM. I wrote Honoring Our Cycles in Africa; and the Center for Women’s Legal Assistance in Egypt requested permission to translate the booklet into Arabic.  

            When I acquired basal cell carcinoma, this medical librarian printed ten studies about the cream my doctor prescribed. Then, he told me that after reading the papers, he would not use it. (I had surgery.)

In 2003, while I worked on a book about natural birth control, Seasonale—a contraceptive made by Barr Labs that gave women “the convenience” of bleeding only four times each year—got FDA approval. My librarian called. He had the transcript of Barr Labs’ announcement of the drug’s availability…made to stock market analysts.

            In 2013, the hospital determined that 1)young doctors used apps to access information about prescriptions and surgical treatments and 2)the library was “not profitable.” It closed its medical library and dismissed the librarian.

A biologist with a complete set of a wildlife journal (edited by his father over three decades) could not find a university to take it.

            An electrical engineer and physicist who’d worked on the Apollo program, written a program to identify and mitigate contaminated soil, studied the impact of solar flares on our grid, etcetera…could not find a place for his books, papers or the computers he’d worked on and saved over 50 years. When I wondered about the university (where he’d taught, for decades) designating a room for his materials, he explained that such an archives would need a curator to notify professors and students about its contents; and the curator would require a (prohibitive) salary. His archives was for him to deal with privately.

            A political scientist noticed that contemporary students rarely read primary source materials. They read summaries. And she can longer access papers she wrote in the 70s and 80s.

After five years, The United Nations deletes records of its proceedings. 

In 2010, a man asked me to organize and describe studies that the Navy had collected in the 1970s about the health effects of exposure to electromagnetic radiation. He had $3000 to post them online. “You’re offering me $3000 for the job?” I asked.

            “Oh no,” he said. “Writing is for volunteers. That money is for the techie.”

My childhood best friend, Michelle Moskovits, a photographer, the only child of Holocaust survivors, committed suicide in 1984, when she was 24. When her mother died, in 2020, I inherited Michelle’s scrapbooks, photographs, and college essays. I offered her papers to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum—and learned that they only take survivors’ papers.

The museum’s failure to recognize trauma’s impacts to subsequent generations still stuns me. Until after October 7, 2023, I knew only the bare bones of Palestine’s history. I did not know about the UK and the UN granting Palestine to Jews in 1948 so that Holocaust survivors would have a home—or that this mandate rendered 750,000 Palestinians homeless refugees…overnight. Certainly, ignorance of this history contributes to our inability to pause the violence and starvation in Gaza today.  

            Palestinian-Israelis groups like Combatants for Peace and The Parents’ Circle (which engage in dialogue rather than revenge) have learned that healing happens when we hear each other’s stories firsthand.

            Archives collect firsthand stories and save them.

            The Internet is not an archives. It’s a global super-factory of individually-owned computers, data storage centers guzzling electricity and water, and access networks, vulnerable to disintegrating hardware, creating contests for energy and water between data centers and householders, spewing toxic waste. Papers can last for hundreds of years. Electronic records last about 10-20 years—unless someone migrates them (every decade?) to newer formats.

In 2022, I called the Schlessinger to check that it would still take my papers. The new curator asked me to outline their contents. In 20 pages, I highlighted my childhood (in suburban Cleveland in 1967, my second-grade class was one third black, two thirds white); my teaching at South Boston High being featured in a half-hour documentary on National Public Radio; living in a New Mexico village (population 73) without a gun; publishing a novel (translated into several languages) about four generations of mothers and daughters (1999); teaching natural family planning in an Amish community for 20 years and in Guatemala for several weeks; creating a library for Amish women in Lancaster County, PA; publishing The Garden of Fertility (2004 and 2021), Honoring Our Cycles (2006) and Honoring Our Cycles in Africa (2007); publishing An Electronic Silent Spring (2014), translated into Korean, about the effects of electromagnetic radiation emitted by devices and telecom infrastructure on wildlife and public health; Mapping Our Technosphere, my not-yet-finished book about the mining, energy, water, toxic waste, worker hazards and fire hazards involved in manufacturing, operating and discarding computers, telecom infrastructure, solar PVs, wind turbines and e-vehicles; speaking about the Internet’s footprint at the United Nations and on a panel with climatologist Dr. James Hansen; labeled family photographs from the 19^th and 20^th centuries; owning and losing a Santa Fe house; living nearly 30 years with a man whose father grew peaches before the U.S. Geological Survey hired him to drill for uranium; trying to reduce my ecological impact while living on income low enough to qualify for food stamps.

Alas. While The Schlessinger has space for more papers, it cannot afford the $150,000/year cataloguer. The committee decided not to take my material.

Archives like the Schlessinger now take papers only from famous women—or those who can pay to have their materials catalogued.

            And writing? Writing is for robots.

I built my first website in 1999, when Riverhead (Penguin-Putnam’s literary imprint) published my novel, The Wholeness of a Broken Heart. Whenever another book came out, I made a website for it. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on these sites. Few people access them, yet I feel obliged to maintain pages like Discovering Power’s Traps: a primer for electricity users; How/can we protect the Earth when we need a car?; Do I report what I’ve learned about solar PVs—or live with it, privately?; Policies for more ecologically-sound tech; Watershed questions; cell tower fires & collapses; The Discovery & Science of Smart Meter Fires; Calming Behavior in Children with Autism and ADHD; Digital enlightenment; reproductive health posters illustrated by Suzann Gage.  

No one can assess their own work’s relevance to history. I do wonder how writers can be responsible to their boxes of correspondence and journals. I wonder how anyone can archive websites affordably—and keep them accessible, including after they die. I wonder what will happen to human history during this digitalized era that features cute cat videos, porn, social media, data for military operations, AI like ChatGPT—and stuff that sells.

This excellent video from Rick Beato, “The Reason Why Music is Getting Worse,” explains electronic technology’s impacts on music and creativity.

OTHER NEWS

REGULATING CORPORATE IMPACTS ON ECOSYSTEMS

On June 28, The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.” This ruling weakens scientists’ role in regulating corporate impacts on air, water, land, wildlife habitats and public health. It strengthens corporations’ ability to do what they want and disregard the ecological consequences. If, for now, our society is done with due diligent assessments and certified reports about a solar PV facility, a wind facility, EV chargers, new access networks, a mining site, a data center’s water demands, etc. from liability-carrying subject-matter experts, what’s constructive for communities that want to reduce ecological harms?

EVs

One in Five Public EV Chargers in the US Don’t Work, Harvard study finds.

Because of failing infrastructure, etc., nearly half of U.S. EV owners plant to return to gas-powered vehicles. Virginia has canceled its mandate to require only EV sales by 2035.  

ENERGY

“Labour Party to ease Green Belt restrictions for data centres,” by Graham Smith, Oryxalign, June 12, 2024. UK’s Labour considers reclassifying data centres as ‘nationally significant infrastructure’ in order to shift decision-making power from local councils to ministers—and build data centres on protected land.

Canada bans compact fluorescent light bulbs. Jen Hodgson. Compact fluorescent bulbs contain mercury. Reducing greenhouse gas emissionsdoes not cancel out toxic pollutants—or radiation emissions. (CFLs also chop the 60 Hz cycle.) 

CHILDREN

Students who attend The Los Angeles Unified School District can no longer use cell phones during the school day. Questions loom about how to enforce the Board’s ruling.

            Surgeon General Vivek Murthy explains that no one was taught to enforce social media limits. Parents need to come together about this while he demands cigarette-like warnings on social media.  

            New York City’s school district could ban cell phones by January.

Detroit parents question income from the school district’s 29 contracts with telecommunications companies to operate cell towers on school properties. Parents say district leaders have failed to be forthright about what's happening with the money generated from those deals. Schools get millions from cell tower contracts.

            Petitions help keep towers away from school. Please sign.

            Parents’ phone habits could affect their children’s language development. 

TOWERS and ANTENNAS

Cell Tower Radiation Linked to Genetic Changes in Nearby Residents, Microwave News, July 1, 2024. There are about half a million cell phone towers in the U.S., and millions more around the world. European scientists report that years of low-dose RF exposure can increase the incidence of a number of different types of chromosomal aberrations. Such changes could lead to serious, though uncertain, health consequences, including cancer and neurological disease.

            “The facts and dangers of rooftop transmitters on high-rise buildings,” by Curtis Massey, Firehouse Magazine. Published in 2005, still relevant for firefighters and urban dwellers. See also my gallery of cell tower fires and collapses.

JOURNALISM

Matt Pearce reports that on June 27, the California Senate voted 27-7 to advance Senator Steve Glazer’s ambitious bill, SB 1327, to tax Big Tech data-mining to fund hundreds of millions of dollars worth annually of journalist employment tax credits.

This is the second jobs bill moving forward this week in the California legislature that would tap Big Tech to fund local journalism jobs. The other bill, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks’ California Journalism Preservation Act, AB 886, advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 25 with a 9-2 vote.

The FUTURE

“Facing a Future of Fewer and Less: Tell Them at Least What You Say to Yourself,” by Robert Jensen, addressing youth: “I grew up in a world of endless bounty and expanding material prosperity, with a belief in perpetual economic growth. My generation was told there would always be more, and the task was figuring out how to share it with everyone in the world. The moral challenge for us was how to solve the inequality problem and figure out how to feed the world. Your generation is growing up in a world that is going to be defined not by expansion but by contraction, and it’s not going to be easy to share more equitably when there is less of everything.”

GOOD NEWS

Dutch digital detoxers unplug en masse. Will the world follow? Amersterdam’s Offline Club, provides a phone-free hangout. “We’re ever more connected online,” co-founders say, “but in the physical world, it’s hard to meet people. This is a real experience: where else are you going to be in a cafe with 30 others, and read a book or draw?”

In the Bay Area, July 27, Laborfest explores what AI logistics, robo taxis, landlines & checkouts mean for workers.

A FUN QUESTION: Ask people what they think our culture should preserve. I asked three people. One said, Jazz. The soulful merging of African and European music.

Another named: The Brandenburg concerti, Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings and Einstein’s papers on solar power.

            Yet another said: How to grow vegetables, build topsoil, preserve food. Deliver babies and attend to the dying and the dead. The Tao de Ching and The IChing. The 12 Steps.

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