The Era of Deep Archiving Begins

As a Dartmouth student in the early 1970s, William McDonough went, somewhat casually, to hear a lecture by a visiting celebrity. Mr. McDonough had little idea beforehand who Buckminster Fuller was, but listening to the designer and futurist had a long-term effect.

Mr. McDonough was late and took one of the last seats left, in the front row. Three hours later, he realized that the rest of the audience was gone but that Mr. Fuller was still talking. “Do you want me to keep going” Mr. Fuller asked politely but unnecessarily. They ended up taking a walk around campus, Mr. Fuller expostulating all the way.

That evening put Mr. McDonough on the path to becoming a prominent architect, but it exists only in his memory, which used to be where just about everything about our pasts resided. Now Mr. McDonough is in the forefront of efforts to change that, to record instantaneously the major intellectual events in our lives. He will be the first living archive at Stanford University.

This means that the architect, a leader in sustainable development, has started filming all of his meetings and recording all of his phone conversations. He will send them in something close to real time to Stanford, which will be making much of the material immediately accessible on the Internet. Even presidents are not observed so closely and so continuously. Mr. Fuller, whose archives are also at Stanford and is something of a guiding spirit to the project, would be envious but probably not surprised.

“How many of our daily discussions are worth keeping a detailed record of” asked Roberto Trujillo, head of the Stanford University Libraries’ Special Collections. “My sense is Bill is booked solid with a lot of meaningful meetings, and so it will be a rich archive. This could well be a model for other repositories and libraries. I wouldn’t claim the idea is unique, but the scope is.”

Jeff Ubois, the founder of the Personal Digital Archiving conference - now held under the auspices of the Library of Congress â€" said he hadn’t heard of anything exactly like what Stanford was doing. Gordon Bell of Microsoft Research won wide notice a couple of years ago for his “life-logging,” which involved putting everything he had accumulated, written, photographed, presented and owns (like CDs) into what he called his “local cyberspace.” That, however, was a personal initiative, not a collaboration with an institution.

“I think this will become a common practice,” Mr. Ubois said. “Now that we know technologies go obsolete, it will be even more important to archive things contemporaneously.”

The traditional format with archives went like this: aging famous person puts together his correspondence and drafts, hires an agent and sells the material to the institution that offered the most look. Stanford, for instance, paid $1 million for Allen Ginsberg’s 300,000-item archive in 1994. Scholars would then slowly come pick through the material, which sometimes carried restrictions for decades.

Mr. McDonough told me in an interview â€" which he recorded, of course â€" that until about a year ago he kept some stuff and threw out other things. It was not a systematic approach. Now he has a full-time archivist, Ryan Martin, whose office is next door to Mr. McDonough’s. Stanford will also have an archivist or two working on this project for the next year or two. But no money is changing hands between subject and university. Mr. McDonough will still control the intellectual property rights to his material, although Stanford will own the actual material.

Sometimes, of course, people do not want their meetings with the architect preserved. “That’s happened twice out of a thousand,” Mr. McDonough said. He must get permission to tape phone calls. The privacy implications of this are still somewhat murky. But meanwhile, even the titles of the books on his shelves are being filmed for posterity.

“The benefit to me is that I’m excited about a lot of things, and I like to share,” Mr. McDonough said. “That feels good. I can get to do my work, and if someone’s affected by it, that’s great.”

As for Stanford, it already is thinking about adding other living archives. “We have some people’s names on our lists,” Mr. Trujillo said. “We’ll start with McDonough and see how it goes. He’s certainly not the only person we have an interest in.”