Sept 24, 2025–We are losing our history.
Here’s a cautionary tale using a now-defunct non-profit organization.
Case Study: I was part of an educational non-profit that existed from 1975-2015. I served roles from board president to cheerleader. Due to the changes in priorities and school budgets, the organization’s reach and support dwindled, and by 2015 the decision was made to dissolve. The timeline probably parallels other organizations whose time has come and gone.
Here’s the dilemma: All that remains of this once active organization are three boxes of records and photos, including newsletters, by-laws, articles of incorporation, board minutes, marketing materials, legislative efforts, promotional videos, and assorted flotsam that non-profits accumulate.
What do we do with them? No one wants those records, but you hate to lose them to history.
I tried. I reached out to two state universities. To state and national archival groups. To the state library. To other states that had programs. There is no longer a national organization. No one wanted our boxes.
We come to the conclusion that our little group might not matter in the arc of history.
But I wonder about similar organizations and media that existed pre-social media. I know how quickly information is lost. When I was researching stories for local hospitals, dance halls, and arts groups, it was unnerving how much of their history only existed in yellowing news clippings, mimeographed minutes, and faded photos sitting in cardboard boxes in someone’s garage.
Even the basic history of when they were formed, who was on the original boards, and how they were funded, for example, was at risk of being forgotten or lost. I remember sitting at a kitchen table, leafing through a scrapbook of hand-pasted news clippings about a local organization. I don’t know where that book ended up.
Does it matter? What are the repercussions of losing archival information?
Part of the answer involves Artificial Intelligence.
AI can be understood as an immensely powerful set of programs that aggregate unmeasurable amounts of information to inform its responses. The limitation is that it can only access information that has been digitized. It can’t leaf through your family photo albums from the 1950s and find black and white snapshots of Aunt Zelda straddling an Indian Chief motorcycle.
Much of that early history has already been lost. Many early television programs were not recorded. If they were, often the studios taped over them to save money.
If they were saved, the storage medium degraded. As we moved from film to tape to floppy diskettes to laser disks to compact disks to zip drives to flash drives, information was lost in each transition. Or, the media to retrieve it became obsolete. How many of us have trunks full of family events stored on videotapes with no VCR on which to play them. I have hundreds of reel-to-reel audio tapes of original songs and garage bands and club gigs, with no working reel-to-reel tape deck on which to play them. One classic rock band member told me how as they were transferring studio recordings from half-inch tape to digital, the acetate literally disintegrated after crossing the playback head.
We all have tubs filled with newspaper clippings from our school days, family photos, and drawings by our kids.
Every songwriter keeps binders of original songs. I have dozens of college-ruled wire-bound notebooks filled with handwritten scribbles stretching back to high school.
I don’t have enough years left to scan and convert all that content I’ve created in just one lifetime.
The larger question? Does it even matter? Does anyone care? Who wants to wade through an old man’s scrawls? The cerebral talk show host Dick Cavett once admitted he stopped journaling, because, looking back at it later, he realized it was all drivel.
Whether we are spewing drivel or channeling Nostradamus, we may not know for 100 years. But people living then, deserve to see the content to make that decision.