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Re: hard disk - long



Not to turn this into a long-running thread, but defining things as documents does not necessarily make them archival or historical.  I grant you Bazooka Joe comics are a document, as are your shoe tongues, but that don't make 'em worth keeping for generations, unless you're Bazooka's Archivist or the sneaker archivist from "Boston Common" a few years back.
 
Needless to say, our job is to separate the wheat from the foodservice packets (no offense, Christine C-O near Poughkeepsie :) ) and save things that have value in the context of our individual institutional missions.  That's why I, for instance, am actively pursuing examples of our early volunteer patches and pinafores worn by the Auxiliary, yet I have no interest in copies of the HIPAA regulations that might be floating around.  The average person's definition of "document' would suggest the latter over the former, but based on the institutional mission, I need the patch and should save it, while I can leave the papers to the good folks in the Federal Government's archives.
 
Like usual, it all comes down to appraisal.

DS

______________________________________
Daniel Sokolow, Archives Coordinator
David Taylor Archives
North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System
155 Community Drive
Great Neck, NY 11021
mailto:dsokolow@nshs.edu