SCA Friday Plenary: David E. Hoffman

Happy Friday! First up at Society of California Archivists’ Annual General Meeting: David E. Hoffman, “Inside the Kremlin: Unraveling the papers of Vitaly Katayev and Soviet thinking during the latter stages of the Cold War.”

Talking about how he used an archives for his research for his book (The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy He won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction.) Tried to write a book from his archival research and his own experiences.

Parallels he saw: Cold War Symmetry with shape of bombs, space shuttles, etc. in the thinking and engineering.

Asymmetry after the Cold War was in understanding and making sense of the Cold War. In the United States= triumphant versus in Russia= introspective and reflective, not triumphant

Challenge: how to write a history that reflects both sides and also getting access to archives (lots of stuff still not open) Very difficult to get into archives in Russia

Goal: To tell the Cold War story from both sides and try to figure out what was going on in the Soviet system

Discovered papers of Vitaly Katayev (former professional staff member, Defense Department, Central Committee, 1974-1991). 10 boxes of papers acquired by Hoover Institution Library and Archives prior to 2001. These papers are very important as most information from the Kremlin is not available. (Katayev died in 2001) In November 2004, Hoffman received a Hoover media fellowship and used time to search collection of Katayev papers. No finding aid, not processed collection. Hoffman was a third of the way through his book research when he began with Katayev’s papers.

Found two inventories: one in Russian and one in English. The one in English referenced 79 floppy, but only a few floppy disks found in the collection. The collection was quite raw-not processed and no finding aid.

Found insights into Soviet thinking that never seen before through the records of Kataylev (many bound volumes). Kataylev wrote a manuscript on the reactions of the Kremlin to Regan’s announcement of SDI (aka Star Wars). Ideas for tons of missiles, a Soviet Star Wars program, etc. Very detailed notes and technical details on spreadsheets. A treasure trove of information, not on Kremlin gossip, but on important technical tests and meeting decisions. This collection allowed Hoffman to see into the Soviet thinking during the Cold War that wasn’t understood before using Katayev’s papers.

Hoffman did an index of nine boxes in 2005 and did a survey with Pavel Podvig in 2006. (Lucky archivists to get the help to index the collection!)

The papers have allowed Hoffman, with the help of scientists, to piece together insight about the actual capacity of the Soviet Union in terms of accuracy of missiles and other technologies. A big mystery was how much Gorbachev knew about the Soviet biological weapons program. United States discovered that the Soviets were not following the agreement to not create chemical and biological weapons.

In 2007, when the box was able to be opened in Kataylev’s collection, Hoffman found documents chronicling the Kremlin’s decisions on biological weapons. Shows decisions under Gorbachev began in 1986. Up until this was revealed, we didn’t know who knew in the Soviet Union and when. The Central Committee resolutions means, according to Hoffman, that Gorbachev must have known about the biological weapons program.

Katayev took very good notes (was the official note-taker at many meetings). Because of his great notes, Hoffman has been able to piece together a lot of new insights on the Soviet weapons programs.

In August 2007, Hoffman met Ksenia Kostrova (26) the granddaughter of Katayev. She was very close to Katayev and became the custodian of his records after his death. Discovered in apartment: family photos, additional documents, 79 floppy disks, and a memoir. From August to December, Kostrova made a mast index and Hoffman photographed all of the paper documents. Copied all the disks and sent entire collection via FTP to Washington immediately. Was able to read 40 of the disks. (Talk about a find for a historian–it’s amazing!) But had problems reading the files. Talked with Kostrova about the procedure to open the files she did when she was 11 years old to decode the files. 19 more of the floppy disks had recoverable data, done by a UK specialist.

Didn’t have to use Russian official archives. Much of the collection is still raw with many documents to be examined. No official Russian government reaction to Hoffman’s book. Hopefully Katayev’s memoir will be published sometime next year.

Take Home Message: Archives are exciting and you can find information that is unique and incredibly important for the understanding of past events and reactions to these events. Many times, you have to do a lot of work and sort through a lot of documents, but it is worth it in the end. Nice work, Mr. Hoffman.

Speaking Gigs

Happy Wednesday! I hope your week is going well. I can’t believe we are already to the middle of the week. Today’s post will be short as I have just a few updates on some speaking gigs this week. (Also, I really have a bunch of stuff to do before leaving for a conference at the end of the week, so I best get to that instead of doing a very long blog post, dear readers.)

Tonight I’m speaking to the Library Connection group about information literacy instruction. Library Connection is organized in part by one of the student groups at San Jose State’s School of Library and Information Science. It should be fun, but as per usual I’m finding last minute stuff I want to include in the presentation. Luckily it’s not until 7:30 this evening. If you are in the Bay Area, stop on by. It’s being held at Cal State East Bay’s University Library.

On Friday and Saturday of this week I’ll be down in San Jose for the Society of California Archivists’ Annual General Meeting (AGM). Hopefully there will be wifi and I’ll be posting some session summaries during the conference. I’ll be chairing a panel on Saturday at 10:30am, so do stop by and say hello. It should be a great discussion on networking, professional development, job searching, and more.

So that’s all I have today, as I’ll hopefully be posting multiple times later this week from the conference. Oh, but writing about speaking gigs made me think of a Lifehacker article, so I have to share it: How to Overcome Burnout when You’re a Superachiever. It’s a good read for all of us stressed by the end of the academic year craziness and those just stressed in general.

As a middle of the week break, check out Festo’s Aqua Penguins:

Take care, have a great rest of your week, and I’ll be back on Friday with some conference session notes. Allons-y!

Librarian ≠ Archivist

Happy Wednesday! I hope you are having a good day. As you read this post, hopefully I will be happily ensconced in the archives at University of California, Santa Cruz doing research. (That is, of course, if Highway 17 hasn’t been closed because of an accident caused by someone driving ridiculously, but I digress.) I love researching in archives. Well, as readers of this blog know, I just love archives in general. Which is why, today, I want to once again re-emphasize that while complementary, libraries are not archives and librarians are not archivists.

So why have I decided to talk about archivists, again? Well, I was reading this article by Michael Stephens, Stuck in the Past. Overall, it is a fantastic article. We would expect nothing less from Michael Stephens and I agree with the need to adapt and evolve in our roles as librarians. However, there was one line that caught my eye and reinforced the fact that even some of the most brilliant and technically advanced librarians have no clue about the differences between librarians and archivists.

Stephens wrote:

Archives and rare books collections will always need librarians to curate and preserve…

To which I say, while I adore librarians, please get them out of my archives. Archives need trained archivists, not librarians. There are fundamental differences between libraries and archives that make it necessary to have educated and trained archivists overseeing archives. We need their expertise in the archives in order to have archives that are organized, respect provenance and are of value to researchers. Archivists are important, not only in managing physical archives, but in curating digital archives as well.

You may be familiar with statement used in many geometry classes: All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. A similar, albeit not as cut-and-dried statement about archivists and librarians can be made: (almost) all archivists are librarians, but not all librarians are archivists. Many archival science programs are now located in library science schools and thus many trained archivists also have taken the required library science courses to get their MLS or MLIS. So your local archivist most likely knows the basics of library science in addition to being well-versed in archival science.

However, in my experience, the reverse isn’t true. Many librarians have never taken an archival science course and don’t understand the profound differences between the two professions. While each is part of the larger field of “information science,” archival science is not equivalent to library science. I don’t think one is better than the other, but I do think it is foolhardy to try to say they are the same thing or that the archives is a specialty of library science. Archival science and the national society in the United States grew out of the field of history and the American Historical Society, not out of ALA and library schools.

So please, all I’m asking is to stop equating librarians with archivists. It is a disservice to both professions and both disciplines. Each has a lot to offer and we need to acknowledge the differences between the two. Just as librarians don’t just shelve books all day, archivists don’t just put things in boxes. Let’s work together to conquer the information world, not try to subsume the archives under the library.

That’s just my two-cents as someone who has been trained as both a librarian and an archivist and works professionally as both. Both sides are wonderful, complicated, and at times frustrating, but they are in no way the same. So please, in our professional discourse at least, let’s try to get it right on this count.

I’m off my soapbox now and will return later this week with some technology tips and maybe even some tidbits from my research trip. If you have a different view of archivists and librarians, please tell me in the comments. I always like a good discussion. Allons-y!

Students and the Wonders of Archives

Happy Wednesday, dear readers! I hope your day is going well. I can’t believe we are halfway through another week. When did time get so wibbley, wobbly? Anyway, today I just want to discuss brieflythe wonders of archives, students, and why I love physical records in the archives.

While I am a big fan of technology (and shiny stuff in general, if I’m being truthful), I probably love physical archival records even more than digital technologies. I know I’m very old school about this, but bear with me while I explain. I love digital archives, I love having finding aids online, and I love all the work archivists are doing to make their archives more accessible and user-friendly. All of this makes my own work and research as both an archivist and an historian easier. But there is nothing like actually seeing the records in person to make me *squee* with joy.

I won’t try to describe my rather unprofessional happy dance when we found a signed, manuscript copy of Henley’s famous poem, “Invictus” (yes, the one used in the movie). Or my reaction to finding a beautifully preserved illuminated manuscript in the archives. Or my joy at receiving a small grant to do preservation work on a collection of letters and other family documents that date from the late 1700s to the 1900s from a local immigrant family. There is something beautiful and engaging about documents. If you don’t believe me, check out James M. O’Toole’s amazing article, The Symbolic Significance of Archives. While digital surrogates are wonderful for preliminary research, there is nothing like seeing the original documents to make me (and I think many others) fall in love with our work as archivists, researchers, historians, teachers, and students all over again.

And these physical records also help me when I’m teaching, which brings me to my second point of this blog post. I could show students digital surrogates of archival records along with the databases for their secondary research, but that’s not what gets them to engage during the instruction sessions–that would be the actual documents. I taught two history seminar classes last week, which was a bunch of fun (and a lot of work, I have to give props to Collin for helping set up the very temperamental laptops for the sessions). The students were wonderful throughout the sessions, but really came alive when I started showing examples of old college scrapbooks, photos from Homecoming Parades in the 1960s, watercolor paintings from the mid-1800s, and especially the amazing 3D images produced by an old stereoscope.

These students, some of whom will become historians, were excited about the documents in ways that I just don’t think they’d get excited about if I had only shown them images on the screen. While it is fantastic, and does open up access, to have the Book of Kells available online, it’s a completely different experience to see it in person.

Using these records also allowed me to discuss archival research in general and the proper behavior in archives. It also generated my absolute favorite question of the academic year: “How do we keep from pissing off the archivist?” This came after I told the students that the archivist is their best friend for finding obscure records and collections they might not have discovered on their own as often the archivist is the only one who really understands what is held in the archives.

So, I just wanted to say I love archives. I love teaching about the archives and archival research and I love sharing archives with others. I’ll end this love letter to archives now, but if you haven’t said hi to the archivist at your institution, make a point to do it this week. You never know when you might need some archival materials for your own research or a library exhibit.

To end, another fun Simon’s Cat video, “Snow Business”:

Have a great rest of your day and I’ll be back on Friday with some tech and library news. Oh, and Happy National Library Week! Allons-y!

Rainy Friday Fun

Happy Friday! I hope you are having a lovely day. I’m off on a research trip today at the Lavender Library in Sacramento. I think it’s a fantastic way to spend a Friday. But back to the post at hand, I have just a few things to share with you today before you get into your weekend. Mainly today is just a bunch of stuff to keep you occupied if you must be indoors because of the rather wretched winter weather that will not go away! Anyway, let’s get into the good stuff.

First, thank you to everyone who responded to my request on Twitter for examples of favorite online archives. I received links to some great archives to share with the history students when they come into the archives in a few weeks. So I thought I’d share just a few links today that you may find useful to share with your library and archives patrons, or just enjoy yourself. Of course there are the large online archives that are fairly well-known, such as the Online Archive of California, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive. But you should also check out some of the smaller collections (and less well-known) online, such as First World War Poetry Digital Archive and the Medical Heritage Library. That should be enough online archives fun to last you through the weekend.

And speaking of fun stuff, check out this lovely article on the untapped power of smiling. I found this to be a fascinating and smile-inducing read. Just think of how much nicer the world would be if people genuinely smiled more.

As you can tell, I’m definitely ready for the weekend (especially since mine involves research at an archives and interviewing interesting people). I think no weekend is complete without some comforting food. So for some comfort food, check out Joy the Baker’s recipe for baked curry sweet potato fries. These fries sound delicious!

Finally, for your Friday enjoyment, check out this short TRON: The Next Day. I found it rather entertaining.

Have a wonderful rest of your day and a fantastic weekend. I’ll be back next week with some more tips, tricks, and news. Allons-y!

Fun Stuff to Share on a Friday

Happy Friday! I’m so excited that it is almost the weekend, even if the weekend is supposed to be gloomy and rainy. So today, dear readers, we are going to throw away any pretense of this being a blog post of great substance on the issues of the day in library and archives land. Instead, this post is to get you ready for the weekend, armed with fun (and helpful) tidbits and goodies to share with whomever you cross paths. Yes, it is a classically random Friday post. Did you expect anything less?

First, something very important and good to share with your family, friends, and library patrons: Give them Lifehacker’s article on how to give to Japanese recovery efforts without getting scammed. Good cause, better if your money actually makes it to those who need it.

If somehow you missed it on Twitter this morning, the videos from Personal Digital Archiving Conference 2011 are now available on the Internet Archive. There are many interesting talks and I highly suggest listening to them, especially if anything I wrote while summarizing them last month didn’t make sense.

In exciting library publishing news, College & Research Libraries is going fully open access. To this I say, yay and it’s about time. Also, could we please make the UI better? It looks a bit wonky in Chrome.

Speaking of open access journals, I have to give props to Evidence Based Library and Information Practice which has always been (so far as I know) open access. Plus it publishes some great research articles, although I may be a bit biased as this journal published my first article and I am on their evidence summaries team. But really, it’s a great journal and the latest issue just came out, so go take a look.

This is something fun to share with your friends (and get a wee bit competitive about who does better on the test, if that’s your thing): The Cambridge Face Memory Test. Take the test to see how good you really are at facial recognition. (This one’s for the people I know who say they are excellent at faces, but quite bad with names. Let me know how you do.)

Lifehacker Night School has done it again. Check out the latest course on Digital Painting 101.

And finally, if you have people coming over in the near-ish future and it is as gloomy where you live as it is in the Bay Area, consider making Chipotle Black Bean Pizza. It sounds yummy and warming, plus who doesn’t like pizza?

Have a lovely weekend, filled with fun, relaxation, and reading. I plan on it. I’ll be back next week with actual thoughts on libraries, archives, tech, and other randomness. Allons-y!

Competition in the Library

Happy Wednesday! I hope you are well, dear reader. This week has been crazy busy on our campus as it is finals week and everything seems to be due by the end of this week. I don’t know why, but deadlines always seem to pile up on each other (and that’s not because I’m super-lazy and procrastinate–I don’t, really). So today I just want to riff just for a short while on competition both with others and with one’s self and how this may or may not be beneficial in the context of libraries and archives.

So why do I want to talk about competition? Mainly I want to write a bit about it because I was asked earlier in the week if I was competitive about anything. The short answer is no, I’m really not that competitive. Now before you think I’m a total slacker who has no drive or wander off because you have no idea what this has to do with library land, bear with me while I give a bit of context before turning to the library.

I’m not competitive with other people. I actually feel happy when others succeed and don’t think “winning” has to be a zero sum game. However, I’m extremely competitive with myself and always expect to work hard and accomplish a lot, not that it’s news to anyone who knows me. (You usually doesn’t take a tenure track position if you aren’t just a little bit into working hard and striving to always become better than you are currently. And you should also be passionate about teaching, but that’s an entirely different post). But as to competing with others, I’d much rather support and mentor others in the field than compete with them.

But where does competition fit in the grand scheme when talking about libraries? I’ll give two examples about competition in the library and archive fields: one that I think is true competition that we can’t really get around and one that is actually competition that isn’t helping us at all. First to what I think of as true competition in the information science fields: grants.

It’s not called a grant competition for nothing. If you write grant proposals, you will be competing against many other libraries, archives, and museums for funding. This is not always a fun prospect and neither is it competition on a level playing field. Grant writing is pretty much unavoidable, but necessary in our fields. So in this instance, I think it behooves us to write grant proposals often to become better at it and to have any chance of success. I’d also, from a totally selfish perspective, like to see more organizations give grants to smaller institutions that have a hard time competing with the very large, well-known institutions for the limited funding available, especially in this economy. But don’t give up and do keep applying because, as our grant officer said, the people who get the most funded grants and also the ones who have written the most unfunded grant proposals.

So grants=competition with other institutions. It’s unavoidable unless your institution can afford to do everything it wants with internal funding.

The other type of competition I want to touch on just briefly in a type of competition that doesn’t seem to work in my mind: competition by libraries against perceived usurpers of the libraries’ and librarians’ roles. Or at least, the way we are competing isn’t working. Libraries (and especially archives) can’t compete with coffee shops, Amazon, or bookstores. And really, why should we? It’s a bit like trying to take on Google. Why fight that battle? Instead, why not work harder and smarter in areas where we already excel and can differentiate ourselves?

I think libraries and archives are awesome. You probably do too if you are reading this blog. We are the converted. We need to stop telling ourselves how great we are and start more outside marketing. Some public libraries, especially, do a good job of this and a great job of integrating themselves into the community. Academic libraries, which are dear to me because I work in one, need to step up and start changing the stereotypes that we all lament about libraries and librarians. We need to be seen as the first place to go if you have a question, not the stop of last resort. We need to advertise our ability as information curators, data managers, and information literacy gurus. We need to stop trying to be something else and actually own what we are because we have a lot to offer.

Okay, stepping off the soapbox now and leaving you with a couple of fun things: first, check out Joy the Baker’s latest recipe: Irish potato candy because it looks yummy and tomorrow is Saint Patrick’s Day after all. Then, if you haven’t checked it out yet, go listen to a single by one of my former student’s band, Waking Wander. (And yes, I completely have to give a shout out when one of my students makes a trip into the library specifically to give me (a librarian!) information about his band. Plus, I think the single is rather good.)

Take care, read lots, enjoy the rest of your day, and I’ll be back on Friday with the usual round-up of tech tips and news. Allons-y!

Protecting Cultural Collections Workshop: Part 1

Happy Wednesday! I hope you are doing well, dear reader. I apologize for not posting on Friday. I was ill and I fear the post would have made little to no sense. But I am back now and want to share a little bit from the workshop on disaster planning and preparedness that I attended yesterday.

So why was I at this workshop? Even though my library does have a disaster plan, and our archives assistant created a basic disaster plan for the archives, we do not have a detailed plan for the archives and special collections. Furthermore, I will admit to being way more interested in part 2 of this workshop series (which will be held in May) when we will get practice salvaging materials. I think everyone needs to understand their institution’s disaster plan or create a plan if there isn’t one in place.

The workshop was held at the California Historical Society in San Francisco and was well attended by individuals from libraries, museums, archives, historical societies, and conservation companies. It is a very nice space for a small workshop, but it was quite cold (although we had chairs and not pews, so it wasn’t as crazy uncomfortable as at the Personal Digital Archiving Conference).

I have just two things I want to share from yesterday’s workshop before I let you get back to your work: one resource and thoughts about water and material damage.

First, one of the coolest resources we learned about yesterday was the Disaster Mitigation Planning Assistance database. It’s a great way to find conservation companies and individual conservators. You can easily update your disaster plan contacts and resources list with this database. I’ve found this very helpful for fleshing out our disaster plan.

The other point is about water, which of course reminded me of the Doctor Who special, The Waters of Mars, especially the Doctor’s line: “Water always wins.” We listened to many examples about water damage due to flash floods, broken pipes, cars hitting fire hydrants outside of historical societies, etc. yesterday. And water does always win. It gets into everything and can cause a lot of damage. However as our workshop leader and conservator, Julie Page, noted, she would much rather have to deal with a water damaged book than a burned book because she has a much better chance of saving the water damaged one. Also, if your building doesn’t have a fire suppression system (often fire sprinklers), then you are massively vulnerable to fire damage.

So, while water might cause a lot of damage (especially to basements where archives often are located), it can also be the lesser of two evils when considering the damage caused by a fire. And considering arson is apparently the leading cause of fire in libraries (I didn’t know that fact), it seems like fire suppression systems should be top priority in any retrofitting project in old library buildings.

I’m sure I’ll have more interesting things to report on after the next workshop, but that’s about all I wanted to say today. Except for yet another plea to back up your personal records and your library’s records in another physical location, just in case disaster does strike. Now I’m going to get off my soapbox and leave you with a fun video. What else could I possibly leave you with than the promo trailer for Doctor Who’s The Waters of Mars? Enjoy.

Have a fantastic rest of your day and I will be back this Friday with some tech and library news. Allons-y!

Ease of Archiving

Happy Wednesday! I hope you are well, dear readers, and are having a lovely week. Today I want to talk about digital archiving and the problem of actually getting people to archive their work. What I don’t want to talk about is the issue with Harper Collins as it has been tweeted by seemingly every librarian on Twitter and has even spawned the The eBook User’s Bill of Rights. So, yeah, don’t really have much to add to that conversation. Instead I have some bits of flotsam that have been rolling about in my head since coming home from the Personal Digital Archiving Conference last week. I thought I’d share and see what you think about it all. Allons-y!

One of the concepts that kept surfacing during the conference was the fact that people are lazy (unsurprising) and don’t want to work to back-up and then archive their work. Now this is not a shocking concept for anyone who has any contact with people, ever. We, on the whole, try to find the easiest and fastest way to get anything done. Now I’m not saying that this is inherently a bad thing. For example, I dislike grocery shopping so I appreciate stores laying out their products in logical arrangements so I can find what I need easily and get on with my day instead of spending 10 minutes trying to figure out on which aisle are the olives.

But when this desire to have everything done in one-step (or preferably without any intervention on the user’s part at all) makes digital archiving seem like a dream, I do have a problem. We heard updates on some amazing work by computer scientists and archivists on creating institutional repositories (IR) that can automatically generate metadata when digital objects are uploaded to the IR at the conference. We also heard about future projects to create one question surveys for users to complete that would generate more useful metadata about their digital objects. I think these advancements are wonderful because I’m not the kind of person who takes the ‘all or nothing’ approach to archival work. Some metadata is better than none and having some people take the time to upload their work to IRs or other digital archives is great. But what about everything we are losing? (And don’t get started on how we can’t save it all. I’m not calling for saving everything. I firmly uphold the principle and practice of appraisal.)

What if you can’t get a metadata form for users to fill out down to one question? Maybe you can’t get everything to be automatically generated in the background without the user contributing something to the metadata creation process. How easy does it have to be to get people to do it?

I wonder about this question not only in the context of archiving but in many facets of life. For example, how easy does searching a database have to be for the majority of students to use it? How much specificity and control over a search do you have to give up to make it “easy enough” to use? Not even talking about digital archiving, but just scheduling back-ups for your computer, how much easier does it need to be than clicking 2 buttons for people to backup their machines? Where is the line, in any case, that separates “good enough” from “results we won’t accept”?

I’d like to hear your ideas on the tensions between striving to make things easy and producing “good enough” results for whatever product or service you are creating. I’m all for good user design and experience, but am having trouble feeling any empathy for people who won’t take the time to at least name their files something intelligible. I have high hopes for the future of digital archiving, both in personal and institutional contexts, but I worry about making sense of it all if people don’t take the time to do (just a bit) of quality control on filenames, metadata, etc..

Or maybe I’m just having one of those days that make everything seem overwhelming and you don’t feel that this is an issue at all or you’ve found a way to solve it in your archives. I’d love to hear about any and all of it in comments.

Now, since it can’t all be doom and gloom on a Wednesday (and because anyone in the Bay Area could definitely use a bit of fun on this rather dreary day), we will end with Simon’s Cat in “Sticky Tape.” It’s short, cute, and funny. Use it for a quick break in your busy work day.

Have a wonderful rest of your day and I’ll be back on Friday with some tech, library, and archives news.

PDA 2011 Closing Keynote

Closing Keynote by Rudy Rucker, Sr.. Let’s get to the summary!

Lifebox Immortality

Science fiction dream of achieving immortality via personal digital archiving. But, we don’t understand how brains store information. It’s not practical to tag everything yourself; you need ways of automating tagging and metadata creation.

Wrote a book called, The Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul. His day job was as a computer science instructor at San Jose State (he is retired now).

Lifebox is an idea of a personal digital archive that is “really good” and that you can search easily. It’s not hard to search your lifebox if you are a writer like Rucker and uploaded a lot of information on your own website and created a custom Google search engine for your site.

In human conversation, people do not answer your questions directly. There is an actual conversation. But you could create a chat bot copy of yourself in a lifebox. What is missing is the creativity of the person in these stand-ins. So you don’t really achieve immortality.

Most people aren’t writers. Rucker says you should write like you talk. You could also tell a story instead of writing the story of your life. This is already reality via speech recognition software. Still missing “the spark.”

Suggested reading: On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins (about neural networks).

Not hard to get chat bots as long as you get people to upload enough data. (That’s always the problem, isn’t it? People have to exert effort which is a hard sell.)

Take away: Easy enough to create a chat bot, but much more difficult to recreate “the spark” or the creativity of humanity. Many approaches to personal archiving, may never be a standardized way of archiving when making “a copy of yourself.”