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 ______________________________________
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