Paper Personal Archiving for the Everyman - An Explanation

The preservation and organization of knowledge is a practice intertwined to the appreciation of humanity and its discoveries.

2023 Reflection
2024 Reflection

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Library and Gallery cataloging answers the questions:
- What do you have in your collection
- Where do I find it?

Paper Personal Archiving for the Everyman takes from these organizational and preservation mechanics and applies them to our memories, experiences, and importances of our individual lives.

- Libraries and the organizations of knowledge collections have gone through countless evolutions over the centuries to keep up with the ever expanding number of records and findings.
- Ancient civilizations practiced cataloging by recording lists of books onto tablets and stone.
- In 7th century B.C., Mesopotamian scholars recorded the authors and titles of their catalogued materials on the walls of their libraries.
- In ancient Greece, libraries such as the The famous Alexandrian Library organized its collection of over 490,000 knowledge records through papyrus scrolls.
- After the invention of the Printing Press, library catalogs were transferred to papers, and by 1791 the first library card catalogs were created by the Revolutionary Government in France.

Information organization has primarily been preserved through paper or tangible forms for centuries (books, prints of photographs, film reels), but new information representation mediums are being introduced faster than ever before—records of catalogs have existing on stone and paper has evolved to existing on floppy discs, to expansive hard-drives, to the "infinite and free" world of cloud storage, and to who knows what else; the vast variety of human records our world now produces innately asks for similarly expansive and adaptable forms of representation.

Every new era of discovery re-evaluates the relevance of previous representation mediums, and asks for a similarly new, expansive, and adaptable form of representation to shadow the previous. This trajectory of birthing new forms of representation over and over again asks a question from within itself, how do we preserve and respect the actual methods of archiving and cataloging, in a way that respects its history, and the culture behind making markings on the tangible to record the intangible? How often does new media truly consider the weight and spirit of traditional archival and preservation practices? Can we propose a callback to a medium outdated and shadowed by the hyper-creation of digital medias? And where do personal events and meaningful accounts stand in the preservation of Knowledge?

**Cataloging practices aims to answer:
What do you have in your collection? Where do I find it?**

*Paper Personal Archiving for the Everyman responds to these questions in the context of our individual lives.*

*Paper Personal Archiving for the Everyman takes from the organizational and preservation mechanics of traditional Library Cataloging and applies it to navigating the personal collection of memories, experiences, and markings of the unique individual, while at the same time preserving the most recently made obsolete form of cataloging.*

*Paper Personal Archiving for the Everyman is an act of reflection and preservation for the future of our lives.*

*Paper Personal Archiving for the Everyman is invitation for anyone and everyone to better express, remember, and curate their experiences to be better remembered in time.*

*Paper Personal Archiving for the Everyman works to eventually create an archive of the archives of people’s lives, each representation of a person's archive, coming together to form a beautiful web of human preservation for the Everyman.*