08/08/2026
The loss of archival materials has always haunted me. I only began thinking about it when trying to uncover mysteries in the Willey House’s past. My best sources were paper books snd documents, printed paper photographs or paper reproductions of them. Already in 2002 I had questions about the longevity of digital media.
Our design firm created a book of all available Willey House correspondence I could find. We transcribed each letter, sequenced them and designed a beautiful book. The book never found a publisher, but it became a primary resource for me in our 5 1/2-year restoration and in the lengthy series I wrote for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s website called “Willey House Stories.”
The compiled archive of letters has been critical to my understanding of the house, of Wright and especially of Nancy Willey. It is priceless.
This year the book of correspondence captured the attention of Eric O’Malley of OA+D. He wanted to publish the collection. I already had the design and all the original files preserved on CDs. Trouble is, the industry standard software platform the book was built on over 20 years ago is basically obsolete. The custom fonts created for the project also built in an obsolete format. The ongoing work to recreate everything is enormous. Sometime in the next year it will finally be in print.
My point being that the documentation I captured and transferred to a contemporary medium became 100% obsolete in just 20 years. The original paper letters still exist in two museums and several scattered archives but those are clusters of unconnected dots.
What the big AI firms are doing is a wholesale sweep of all old books to suck out their contents and destroy the durable paper copies. It is terrifying how easily and briskly this takes place. For God sakes keep your books! Build your own libraries. Maybe no one else will.
About 15 years ago I asked a series of professional archivists what the archives of the future would look like. The best answer I got was PDFs, a privately owned file format that could vanish in an instant in the whim of a single greedy corporation.
