Preserving for the future

A paper that is worth printing, is worth preserving; if worth preserving, it is worth binding; for this purpose we issue in pamphlet form and if every subscriber shall preserve each copy of the "News" and bind it at the close of the volume, their children's children mayread the doings of their father's which otherwise might have been forgotten; ages to come.

- Willard Richards, "Prospectus" Deseret News Vol. 1 No. 1 p. 1

This paragraph is on the first page of the first issue of the Deseret News. As far as a preservationist point of view it has a very futuristic feel to the verbiage but the wording and the "who" I found to be even more interesting. It calls upon the subscriber to take pains to preserve the paper, not the Newspaper itself. It knew they would not be perfect but it also knew that in duplication and distribution the preservation of "...the doings of their fathers..." could be preserved. This was more than 100 years before Microform dissemination of newspapers became a common practice in getting back issues of newspapers into the libraries of the world. It is also more than 150 years before digital images of article text would not only become available, but commonplace. After all, I am viewing the digital version of this newspaper to do this blog. Could they have foreseen this?
Even Utah, by this standard and after this admonition, did not begin preserving their records very well for another fifty years and that after some cultural growth from a bare subsistence focus to a society working to break out of the "frontier" culture and into the mainstream of the west. It was around that time (1894) that the Genealogical Society of Utah was founded which has been one of the models for archiving, distribution, and development of record preservation in the world. Even they did not begin for another forty-four years.
So what could be the lesson, the moral of the story? Write it down, write it down again, and then later the same day when you have some time, write it down again. Hopefully one of them will make it to tomorrow.