Woman, 100, has journaled every day for 90 years: ‘No excuse for me not to’ read the headline in the Washington Post on 9 February with a picture of Evie Riski and her dozens of diaries. Over the years Evie’s family has resorted to the diaries from time to time to resolve ‘minor disputes’ but in years to come they will be an extraordinary unbroken record of Evie’s life and broader events. 

A kind friend pointed me to a recent episode of the BBC series A Point of View in which writer and researcher Sara Wheeler talks about the joy of getting lost in archives and also the gaps e.g, fax correspondence reduced over the years to gleaming white paper with no printed text. Increasingly, we know about the fragility of digital records and how easily they can be lost*. There is something wonderful about recording the ordinary and the everyday, the stuff of all our lives. And in cursive script too. 

*If you’re interested in the challenges of preserving digital records in the long term take a look at Maxwell Nelly-Cohen’s Century-Scale Storage https://lil.law.harvard.edu/century-scale-storage/