Preservation Can Be Message to Future

July 10 -- Walt Whitman wrote poems for his masterwork, Leaves of Grass, on scraps of paper picked up off the floor of the printing office where he worked.

Apparently, as he wrote more poems, he fastened the slips together in different orders with straight pins that were used in the days before paper clips — something that might once have seemed like an insignificant detail.

However, by examining the pinholes in the slips saved among rare manuscripts at the University of Virginia, a historian later was able to reconstruct different groupings of the poems and the different orders in which Whitman considered them, says Heather Moore, head of public services at the university's Albert H. Small Special Collections Library. The analysis shed new light on Whitman's creative decisions before Leaves of Grass was first published.

At the time, who knew pinholes could say so much?

Maybe nobody, archivists say.

Likewise, few considered that advertisements and graphic design in old newspapers and magazines — thought of by some as space filler when they were published — would be such a treasure trove to modern-day historians about prices, products and cultures of the past.

"Seeing the original document tells a lot more of the story about the creative process than looking at [a modern-day printing of] a portable Viking Faulkner at Barnes & Noble," Moore says. "You can really see the paper. You can smell the document. You can see the ink. … You can see if there are cross-outs or if there are no cross-outs."

What’s Important?

Few know for sure what about today's e-mails, Internet content and digital files people will find valuable, which is why archivists are trying to save as much as they can right now.

The Library of Congress is involved and is working with other organizations to save content from these still-early days of the Web, which might otherwise perish, yet may say a lot about modern culture to future generations.

"The name of the game today, obviously, is the Internet and the Web and trying to capture [it] in some meaningful way," says Marc Roosa, director of preservation for the Library of Congress. "I don't think we know if we've lost a significant portion of it yet, because I think we're still too early in the digital era to know. I think as far as commercially available digital materials are concerned, a lot of them are still out there."