IT IS TIME FOR DURABLE RECORDS

JANE W. LARSON

Computers may not be the best way to preserve
today’s history, nature, and scientific achievements ?

Sappho, in 640 BC, hoped that “Someone, I say, will remember us in the future.” Each culture through the ages has generally sought to preserve its history and legacy, and it is to be hoped, but far from certain, that society today will preserve for the future the many developments in knowledge and invention gained over this last century. It is to be hoped that the vanishing world of current biodiversity at least will be on permanent records as a help to future fossil studies.

The frenetic pace of modern life, the vast quantities of information of every sort, and the staggering rate at which animal and plant species are disappearing each year should give reason enough to stop to consider just what sort of legacy the world of today is leaving for future generations, and how that legacy will be conveyed. Books crumble to dust on library shelves, priceless card catalogues are being retired in favor of space-saving computerized records, and e-mail correspondence usually is deleted at the click of a mouse.

ART IMITATING NATURE

There is growing interest in creating new “fossil” records using clay, a durable and permanent medium, to make cognitive art that might also be of great beauty. Clay murals depicting scientific knowledge, local flora, and other subjects provide a way to preserve for future generations the images important to society today. At James Hubert Blake High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, for example, the 10th grade class spent the spring 2000 semester making a 4 x 10 foot ceramic mural for one wall of the school. Students applied freshly cut flowering plant material found in the areas around the school, along with stamp cut-outs accurately made from photographs of objects and people (including each student) and textbook-drawn imagery. There is an emphasis on school subjects that students find important and want to understand better.

Clay, which makes up almost half of Earth’s matter, is an excellent medium for taking this type of snapshot. In nature, plants became embedded millions of years ago in pockets of soft mud, resulting in what paleontologists call a “bedding plane” of stone. Fossil prints found in the crust of the Earth are among the most accurate records of the past that exist to help in understanding the history of life on Earth. Clay also has long been used by humankind as a type of permanent paper on which to put all kinds of messages. Buried cuneiform clay tablets, preserved by the thousands near the earliest ancient civilization, Sumer, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, are thought to have started in the eighth millennium BC, when bits of flattened and inscribed clay tokens were used as market records.

Society today has many ways to tabulate and preserve data, but there is a new interest in creating durable records as cognitive artwork. In the stunning new F.D.R Memorial in Washington, DC, bronze tile murals depict the achievements of the New Deal (see Figure 1). In the front lobby of the Chemistry Building at the University of Maryland, a 4 x 10 foot mural illustrates the “Molecules that Shaped the World” (see Figure 2). Cut into clay at the left and right sides are large molecular diagrams of chlorophyll and heme, showing the similarities between these two vital foundations of the plant and red-blooded animal worlds. At center stage is the adenosine triphosphate (ATP) molecule, which provides the energy to run, as the girl beside it illustrates.

At the National Library of Medicine, in Bethesda, is another 10-foot mural called “Ten Molecules that Matter to Medicine,” finished just last year. Textbook diagrams, this time of molecules chosen by agreement among doctors, are shown surrounded with related imagery, such as, on the far left, a patient on a guerney with a pillow under his head. The doctors involved in approving the design note that the pillow indicates he’s not dead, just unconscious, and that the image illustrates the importance of ether, essential still to the practice of medicine (see Figure 3).

WHY WORRY ABOUT RECORDS IN THE DIGITAL ERA?

This is an age in which information is available in staggering amounts. Television, radio, newspapers, magazines, e-mails, and other sources provide too much information, more than any human can process in a given day, perhaps. But there are sobering reasons to seek the informational accuracy and durability of clay. The Congress passed laws to make more expensive, acid-free paper mandatory for government documents only 19 years ago. The Library of Congress, thankfully, today has an active program of treating papers and books to remove the acid, adding perhaps 500 years to the lifespan of the books in its care. But think of all the untreated documents produced during the spectacularly productive last century that surely will perish, if they have not already been lost! NASA already has lost vital taped footage of its trip to the moon. Government archives have lost some thousands of papers through sudden fires, and archivists are still grappling with how to handle the massive volume of e-mail generated by federal agencies.

The greatest threat of all is the growing dependence on digital storage of just about everything. Disks and tapes are a thoroughly fragile means of archiving material, yet librarians are hastening to transfer their card files to this medium. The Council on Library and Information Resources feels this is a matter of grave concern: “When a culture loses its memory, it loses its identity. As digital records of our culture, our science, history and government, disintegrate or become unretrievable, we leave an incomplete, defective history to future generations.” Average lifetimes of CD-ROMs and magnetic tapes are now estimated at 10-50 years, though the equipment on which to play them may be unavailable well before that. The Encyclopedia Britannica is contemplating publishing its current edition, with all of its valuable summations and final evaluations of the 20th century, on computer disk rather than paper, assuming that science will come up with the answer on its durability.

BACK TO BASICS

If society has progressed enough in knowledge to choose pieces of valuable data worth recording in stone, as did the Sumerians, Egyptians, and many other ancient peoples, when do we start, and how? Industry groups, like the chemists and doctors already mentioned, can seek to create their own records of achievements in clay murals. Towns and cities can develop their own durable public art; a record of local plants, for example, could be incorporated as a frieze wrapped around a municipal building. And columns for public parks could offer a new kind of memorial to the favorite activities that take place there, along with a record of the local trees and flowers (see Figure 4).

Various techniques can be used to create these murals. With bas relief, the imagery is raised above background; with sunk relief, the imagery stays on the surface and background is dug away around it. A third technique, the bedding plane, preserves imagery below the surface, thereby retarding erosion over the centuries, as is the case with natural fossil records. One might wish for printing presses that could print thin slabs of clay backed temporarily by canvas, the finished products to be stored in stone shelves underground like the cuneiform clay tablets of old.

But beauty, as well as detailed professional images, also is important. Simple clay stains over bisqued clay, with a clear, glossy glaze applied later, will allow minute details to show through. Nuances such as leaf veins, hairy stems, and peeping buds will be clear for the scientist. Indeed, the impressions of today may prove to be part of the fossil record of tomorrow. In the Washington, DC, area, where blight threatens the famous dogwood trees, clay murals finished 17 years ago may well outlive the species (see Figure 5).

A hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand years from now, who knows what will be left of today’s society. Perhaps these buildings or murals will have crumbled. But perhaps the scientists of the future will find the pieces and use them to recreate the past, just as archaeologists today painstakingly piece together the shards of broken pots tossed away by ancient cultures. Along with the achievements and information important to society today, the murals created now also can provide a durable means of recording and remembering the natural world, in all its wonder and beauty.

Additional Resources:

Baker, Nicholson. “The Author vs. The Library.” The New Yorker,October 14, 1996, page 50.
Rothenberg, J. “Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents.” Scientific American, January 1995, page 42.

Jane W. Larson, the widow of C. E. Larson (CC 1959-1999), is a former librarian and science reporter. For the past 35 years, she has experimented with ways of offering detailed and accurate information about nature, first on the sides of vessel forms and then on ceramic wall plaques. She is drawn to the artistic depiction of scientific fact, in which relative indestructibility and permanence serve to counteract shifting urban values and the turbulence of contemporary life.

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