Kipple

Transcript

1. Julian Pankratz

   This is Audio Logs. I’m Julian Pankratz, and today I’m with two members of the Lazarus team: Miranda Lawson, who leads the program, and the archivist J. R. Isidore, whose essay on digital clutter has become something of a cult favorite around the office. Welcome to you both.

2. Miranda Lawson

   Thanks, Julian.

3. J. R. Isidore

   Hello. Thank you. I don’t usually do this sort of thing.

4. Julian Pankratz

   Your essay is called “Kipple.” What is kipple?

5. J. R. Isidore

   It’s a word an old neighbor of mine used. It means the useless things that pile up when nobody is paying attention. Junk mail. Empty matchbooks. Old cables. Nobody brings them in on purpose; they just arrive. And his theory was that kipple drives out everything else. Leave a room alone long enough and you can’t find anything that matters in it.

6. Julian Pankratz

   And data is the same?

7. J. R. Isidore

   Data is worse. Physical clutter at least takes up space you can see. When we review an organization’s storage, usually two-thirds of the files have never been opened since the day they were made. The important records are in there somewhere, in four slightly different copies.

8. Miranda Lawson

   And people assume that keeping everything is the safe option. It isn’t. Every useless file is something that has to be migrated, secured and searched through. Clutter is how archives lose things without ever deleting anything.

9. Julian Pankratz

   Miranda, Lazarus is known for bringing things back. What’s the hardest recovery you’ve done?

10. Miranda Lawson

    Technically? A set of drives that had been through a fire. But the hardest ones are never technical. They’re the cases where a family wants something back, a person, really, in the form of their messages and photos, and you have to be honest about what can and can’t be restored. I’ve spent my career bringing back things everyone said were gone. You learn to be careful about what you promise.

11. Julian Pankratz

    J. R., how did you come to archiving?

12. J. R. Isidore

    I used to repair animals. Electric ones, mostly, for a pet hospital. You learn to tell what’s worth fixing. Once I got one wrong. I thought it was a machine and it wasn’t. After that I wanted to work somewhere the point was to keep things, not to judge them too quickly.

13. Julian Pankratz

    That’s quite a story.

14. J. R. Isidore

    I think about it a lot. It’s probably why I’m careful about deleting anything. But careful isn’t the same as keeping everything. You ask four questions. Is it unique? Is it evidence of something? Would anyone want it in fifty years? Can we keep it readable that long? If the answer to all four is no, you let it go, and you write down that you did.

15. Miranda Lawson

    That last part matters. Deliberate deletion, with a record, is part of preservation. It’s the opposite of losing things.

16. Julian Pankratz

    Any advice for listeners staring at a hard drive full of kipple?

17. J. R. Isidore

    Don’t try to win. You won’t. Just keep one room clear. Pick the folder that matters most, sort it, and keep it sorted. That’s enough. That’s more than most people manage.

18. Julian Pankratz

    Miranda Lawson, J. R. Isidore, thank you both.