Scott Simon, from the NPR show: Weekend Edition delivered the keynote address Thursday morning.
His talk centered around his recent experiences with the book. While reading his notes from an iPad- no stranger to technology here- Simon shared the pleasures he and his family experiences reading together the classic Pinocchio that they bought at Treehorn Books in California this summer. As Simon poetically stated: “Part of the beauty of books on shelves, is that they seem to call out to each other.”
Despite this poetic scene and experience of reading a classic with his wife and daughter 4 and 8 years old, Simon is a realist and shares concerns with archivists about the forces that work against what he terms as “total preservation.”.
These challenges include but are not limited to:
– changing technologies
– local and global political shifts
– changing values over time
As Simon posed: “What pertinent moments will be lost to us forever?”
This address certainly left me wondering what I can be doing to ensure that as much content as possible that we deem valuable gets preserved. It’s next to impossible to know what will be valuable to us as a society in 10 years, let alone 50, but we have to start somewhere. So preserving the materials we currently deem valuable seems like a good place to me to start!