Document Preservation Quotes

It's amazing what's buried in old, poorly digitized PDFs hosted on some random professor's website.

It is therefore necessary that memorable things should he committed to writing, and not wholly betaken to slippery memory which seldom yields a certain reckoning.

President Trump's frequent, unfiltered use of his personal Twitter account as a means of official communication is unprecedented. If the President is going to take to social media to make sudden public policy proclamations, we must ensure that these statements are documented and preserved for future reference.

A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.

What's an archive, son? Is that anything like a closet?

Our soldiers did not go to some foreign country and risk their lives in vain and defend our Constitution so that decades later you can tell me it's a living document ever changing and is open to interpretation. The guys who wrote it were light years ahead of anyone today, and they meant what they said - now leave the document alone, or there's going to be trouble.

It is the duty of every good citizen to use all the opportunities, which occur to him, for preserving documents relating to the history of our country.

The Archivist of the United States essentially works for the American people across partisan lines and not, regardless of which Administration nominates the person, for a particular President or political party.

For the Archivist, this role is a result of his obligation to preserve and assure timely and maximum access to our governmental records in the evolving historic saga of the American people.

Not only the Archivist alone but all who work for NARA are designated custodians of America's national memory.

… history is that which transforms documents into monuments

The result is - document destruction - we're really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that we're going to come to. There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.

The thinking was that so long as the British kept our basic documents in their hands and so long as they kept the formal right to change them, changes in our system would be careful and deliberate.

I don't think paper will go away. I do believe that the value of paper will change, and Xerox is working on changing that value. Consider a color page. Actual life is in color, but you keep reproducing it in black and white. You remove value. It's a bad thing to do.

Never write a letter if you can help it, and never destroy one!

I made a written report which is still today in existence. I have a photocopy of it, and I am saying that in production this aircraft could perhaps substitute for three propeller- driven aircraft of the best existing type. This was my impression.

If you file your waste-paper basket for fifty years, you have a public library.

No one loves an archive better than I do. I can smell a good one half-a-block away - all that brittle papyrus dust is music to my nostrils.

Besieged by lawsuits that threatened to engulf almost everyone at the White House, Clinton assistants shunned paper or e-mail records of their daily deliberations. One told me that he would go down the hall to confer with his division chief face to face rather than discuss an issue on the telephone.

I have never met a document I don't like.

Some archives and record offices are housed in your local museum or library; others have their own stand-alone building. Wherever they are, they are a treasure trove.

I play a curator, the most American part you can think of. My work is to protect the Declaration of Independence. I work at the National Archives in Washington.

It can be lost, and it will be, if the time ever comes when these documents are regarded not as the supreme expression of our profound belief, but merely as curiosities in glass cases.

What are the libraries of science but files of newspapers?

Most archivists don't like surprises. That's why we work in the past.