#scrapbooks

The Disappearing Scrapbook: What happens to the memories captured on obsolete platforms?

Last year, I had the great pleasure of reporting a feature for my (Amherst College) alumni magazine about archives in the digital age. It came out in the winter print issue, and it's up online now!

How should Amherst students and alums of the digital age leave a record of their lives? As the College archivists help faculty and staff shift their practices around record-keeping, can they do the same with students—or does the proprietary, corporate and, most of all, ephemeral nature of digital life today render that task nearly impossible?

The initial seed for this piece was a comment from one of the college's archivists to my editor that he could tell you what a student had for lunch in the 1890s, but not in 2004. *I* ate lunch there in 2004—and I knew exactly what he meant. The ephemerality of our digital lives—whether due to obsolete platforms from the 90s and 2000s, or the deliberate design of social media 2010-the present—means we all have somewhat patchy portraits of the past few decades. I wound up traveling to my alma mater to talk to the archivists about how they approach this challenge, and it was *such* a great conversation; they even made me reconsider the fundamental question of what archives are actually for.

New double spread in my films scrapbook! Not jam packed with detail but I think it works!

February💘