Well, thank you, Nancy and Alice. And thanks, everyone, for coming. I look forward to this. I especially look forward to tomorrow, I hasten to add, when I feel I can really learn a lot from everybody here.

        The title of this conference has changed a little bit over time from when Alice first inveigled me to keep this date free, with Nancy's support. And today we've got this title, "The Global Record: Ensuring its Future for Scholarship." The slightly-less-challenging one that I was given earlier was "Global Information in the Academic Universe of the 21st Century," but swapping "universe" for "world," and "record" for "information," the idea of "global," it's still pretty ambitious.

       My task was to keynote something global, universal, sort of cosmic, and I wasn't sure how to do that. I know full-well -- and anybody here who knows me knows all too well -- that I'm not acute technically. I take a lot of time to use machinery, and I still prefer old ways. So I thought that given the huge size of this topic and the technical brilliance and experience of the people who'll be speaking tomorrow that rather than trying to find flaws with the PCWA (Political Communications Web Archiving) -- which I intend to master tomorrow, if that's okay -- and other practical details, I thought I'd talk as I like to write on a rather smaller more personal scale. It's a mainly 20th century topic. This is, after all, where I spent most of my life. I hope that some of these ideas will be relevant still, for the archiving that we're going to be analyzing tomorrow.

       I want to start in this rather keynote kind of role, with a couple of examples from 44 years ago both dealing with archival experience. I share this to remind us of the world, some people might say the world we have lost. Others might say, for good reason; the world we've abandoned.

       The first of these was back in 1961 and 1962. That was my first intensive use of an archive. It was a research job that I was given as a young graduate student at Yale by Mary Wright, still my absolutely revered, teacher. She was a brilliant woman and a Chinese scholar and historian. She had long been thinking about a book related to the 1911 revolution in China. The 50-year rule then at the Public Record Office in London (PRO) meant that in 1961, the first of the archives on 1911 were becoming available for outside scholars, as long as they had the right introduction. So, with a small promise of stipend and great excitement I set off back to my native land to find out what this mysterious PRO was.

       The PRO, as I found rapidly, was a dark and subterranean building off old Chancery Lane in the city of London, jammed with all of the documents from the British Foreign Office and, in those days, with many of the rare newspapers and other sources for research. I found it dark, feudal, and entrancing from the first moment I went in there. I loved the rumble of the trolleys of documents as they came towards me in their huge bound volumes, driven by retainers who had clearly been there since the Hanoverian Age. I just loved it.

       One could go out whenever one wished and find oneself in the bustle of the city life. The city of London was right there. You weren't far from the Inns of Court; you weren't far from the beautiful law area. The businesses, a sense of being near commerce, White Hall and so on, it was a lovely place to be. I spent my days working there scanning these early 1911 documents for the material on the 1911 revolution that the Chinese themselves had not told us. That was Mary Wright's idea: to use the Foreign Office papers of the very shrewd Consular Service and the regular staff in China in 1911 to find a whole range of background material on what the Chinese themselves had been doing. We hoped to get a kind of fix, a bracketing on the sources we were beginning to get from China.

       This was an emotionally charged problem because both the nationalists of Chiang Kai Shek, who'd retreated to Taiwan, and the new communists in the mainland government of the People's Republic, had their very, very powerful agendas about how to interpret 1911, what kind of revolution it was. And so, of course, did the British.

       The work was, on the whole, well-received. I found all kinds of surprising things. I found some wonderful material because the personnel in the Consular departments were extraordinarily good and observant. They wrote at great leisure. Some of them hadn't yet discovered the typewriter, I was glad to see, but had excellent handwriting. The enormous bound volumes just glided past. One just began to get a sense of when you were seeing something for the first time; when you could backtrack; when you could get another volume; when you could start sliding off into somewhere else, maybe into a different kind of level. I started on the famous FO 371 documents, the sort of steady Consular and Beijing reports, and then branched out. Mary Wright gave me complete freedom to go wherever I wanted on this, and so, to my amazement, did the staff, although it took a bit of time and one had to fill in quite a few forms.

       I did notice one or two things that puzzled me, which was that at intervals when I was hot on the scent of some absolutely mind-blowing exploration, there would be a page or a marker on a page across which was stamped "page removed." And I thought, "Well, this was about 1911. Why should they be removing this page?" It was only when I asked that question occasionally that there would a kind of a silence from the supervisor and they'd say it probably had been needed somewhere else. I asked, "Well, how do I get to that other place?" And they'd say, "Well, that's not for your sort of callow researchers. That's a more complicated issue." I didn't find any way of getting through that one rather fundamental barrier. I want to come back to that point later, because there are barriers to our research.

       That time is as clear as it was at the time now to me over 44 years later. It was my baptism -- not of fire -- it was a baptism of delight, I think, of finding the joy of somebody alert in the place itself, trying to share with their superiors and, by accident, with you, what they'd been experiencing.

       Just about a year and a half later, after doing those researches in '61 or '62, in the fall of '63, I'd had my second example here. I'd registered by this time for a PhD in the History Department in Chinese History and I'd chosen the 17th century which, in those days, wasn't studied. It just wasn't done. It was between the 16th and the 18th, and that wasn't any good at all. So I immediately loved it. I loved having a century to myself, particularly because my tutor for three really demanding years at Cambridge had been Geoffrey Eltsend (sp?), later Sir Geoffrey and the Regis Professor at Cambridge. That kind of saturation with constitutional studies had led me to think that the chance of having a month to yourself was really rare. Having a century to myself was intoxicating.

        I embarked, full of hope, on my 17th century studies. My search for the perfect teacher led me to Australia, where I enrolled in a one-person course with a wonderful Chinese scholar called Fang Jiao Ying (sp?). Through Mr. Fang, with whom I worked for a year in Canberra on Chinese documents, I got an introduction to the archives of the Chinese Ching Dynasty. That was China's last dynasty, from 1644 to 1911, again, echoing the work I'd do for Mary Wright. But Mr. Fang was able to give me an introduction to the head of the archives in Taiwan. This reminds me of the global politics of archiving, to which I also want to return later.

       The nationalists, under Chiang Kai Shek, in fleeing from the communists, or, judiciously, retreating from the communists, chose to take many, many planeloads of archives, as opposed to many planeloads of people, who might rather have escaped as well. The reason behind that is interesting. It's probably related to something of a cliché, but also a reality of Chinese respect for history. At the same time, that does not stop the Chinese from altering history or changing it in various ways when they feel that is suitable. The archives and the person I was studying were in Taiwan, and Mr. Fang knew that because he knew everything. He also happened to know the director of that archive, and he gave me an introduction.

       I found myself in the town of Tai Jung, which is about halfway down the island of Taiwan, well south of Tai Pei, in a village in the mountains there called Wu Fung. There, in crates, were stored the original archives of the 17th and early 18th century rulers The Kuomintang nationalist government, had brought the archive when it retreated because, of course, the country that controls the past controls the future. Symbolically, that was why they had chosen to bring the archives and make them available. They weren't yet on public display in any way. In fact, it was just Mr. Fang's reputation as a scholar and his friendship with the director that led me to this lucky break which, I must confess, helped me considerably in later life.

       It wasn't long since I'd done my international service in the British Army, and one thing that struck me from the first second while I was actually waiting for a document, the first one I'd asked for, I heard a familiar sound. I'd never heard it in combat, but I knew the sound very well. It was a machine gun firing. And I found that the archival base had been placed near the machine gun training range in the Wu Fung hills. Again, I think I never found an officer to ask about this or a curator who would tell me, but I figured it was to remind one that the luxury of studying the archives was part of an ongoing struggle for power and dominance, you know, among the Chinese people themselves. So, all through that research, unlike the sort of bustle of Chancery Lane traffic, instead one had the sporadic machine gun fire as one tried to make one's way through the documents.

       I found everything I wanted and could have hoped for. I had various experiences that we can share later, I think, as we discuss these things. One is the tactile feel of archives. Maybe that's just too sentimental. It's been abolished in most ways now, but it's amazing to feel the heavy sort of paper in Chancery Lane and, just the same way, it was amazing to hold these Chinese state documents in your hand. It was also fascinating to get the size of them. The only way you could see that would be to hold them. The first, maybe the second or third day I was there, in fact, I asked for some moils (sp?) to the emperor -- these were state papers sent to the emperor by one of the emperor's confidential assistants, a person who was somewhat close to what we now may call a secret informant on the bureaucracy. The curator brought them to me, and at first I basically couldn't see them. I didn't get it. He said, "Here they are." And I sort of said, "Where are they?" It turned out that the one thing that had never ever occurred to me was that they were only a few inches high and they were folded like a concertina.

       It had never occurred to me that the emperor would want to read something like this, and could do it with his own courtiers around. In other words, you could read a state document as long as it was no larger than the palm of your hand. By folding it in this concertina form, which was used for other documents you would open them up like sort of an accordion shape. When it was tiny, it was very moving. All the messages were in black. The officials wrote in black and there would be occasional flashes of bright red on the document, like a cardinal bird in springtime. The vermillion, the red, was when the emperor commented, because only he was allowed to write in the vivid red. One would never have caught that in a photographic black-and-white reprint, the idea of the blackness and then the flash of red of the emperor sometimes just saying, "Fine. Tell me more. Yes. What is it?" Other times making a really careful comment, which he'd written again, in the margin, interlineally between the lines. All of these were exciting moments for me.

       I had the feeling that I was really getting somewhere, really discovering something. I began to ask a few more questions. I was told that, in one or two cases, things I'd wanted, in fact, had been put on microfilm. There were very few, but they said I could look at one or two of them. They did have two new microfilm readers, which had been given by an American foundation. So, with great excitement, I loaded the machine and turned it on, and nothing happened. Again, as I said, I'm technically challenged. I reflected on this for some time and I found there was no bulb in the microfilm reader. Stretching my Chinese to the full, I asked if anybody had a microfilm bulb. It turned out that nobody had thought of such a thing, nor had the foundation that gave the machines. Because why would you bother about giving a bulb? Well, the point is there may be certain parts of the world in which people don't necessarily carry microfilm bulbs wherever they go. Taiwan was, I guess, one such place. I tried to get bulbs from Tai Bei. No luck.

       Drawing on the recesses of my own experiences as an eager reader and an illegal reader at night in various boys' boarding schools, I noticed that there were one or two aged standard lamps scattered around the side of the room. In one of my finest moments, I took one of the standard lamps, without asking permission, carried it across the room, tilted it sideways over the top of the microfilm reader, covered my head with a blackout curtain, and faintly, faintly, faintly, on the white screen, I could see Chinese characters from these archives. I don't recommend that as a procedure, but it was fun to do. It made one feel a little bit in charge of a very odd situation. Since it was also extremely hot in Tai Jung, the experiment didn't last for very long. I could say I was sweaty, but triumphant that I was able to read those characters.

       A number of reflections occur to me in retrospect from just these two examples. I'd like to try and put those little experiences of mine in a wider context that may be of more interest to the archival community. I chose three areas, because academics have to choose three areas. More is just embarrassing; less is also embarrassing. I'm going to try and cover each of the three areas we could illuminate, and generalize from in my talk. One I'd call the problem of archives and national prestige and security. The second: what constitutes an archive? What do we mean by that word? The third would be what about archival dispersal or universalism or ambience, the sense of where the archive comes from? So, with those three in mind, let us try and put our remarks in this kind of context.

       First, let us address archives and national prestige and security. One thing I think about -- I admit that I was dealing with revolutionary archives -- but archives can contain crucial and even deadly information. When we talk about wanting them all open all the time, that's a complicated thing. The archives, after all, I've been reading; have dealt with revolutionary organizations and political affiliations of the late Ching Dynasty. Maps in archives are extremely important because of their role in boundary disputes and similar arguments. Depictions of other peoples within a given society are crucial to later ethnography and attempts to find meanings among peoples in such society. Just take the 56 minority peoples of which China is allegedly constituted. The definitions of these minority groupings are important and economically highly significant to the state. There are intimate details that descendents of families may not want to be divulged. There are many other rules that we could think about here.

       The question I'm interested in is, what is the correct lag time? I hope, at least, we'll talk about that. What time should we allow to pass before we make something available to everybody? I know many people found a 50-year rule absurd, outdated, and sought every legal means to circumvent it, and still do. The one problem is, who makes that determination? On what sort of grounds is the determination made? The other is, is it recklessly made?

       I might just give one example. Fifty years seems such an incredibly long time. But, for instance, even if the 50-year rule had stayed in place in Britain instead of being shortened by various stages, the 1921 founding of the Communist Party, which was covered in some later archives, would have been available to a Chinese scholar from the mainland. with only the briefest of introductions, in the year 1971. That is a straightforward 50 years: 1921, the founding of the party; 1971, our putative researcher comes to London with a simple letter of introduction. 1971 was the most murderous year of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in which the hunt for anybody who had shown disloyalty to the Communist Party could lead to their deaths and that of all of their families. That reminds us how fast history sometimes changes. So a twenty-year-old in 1921 would have been a seventy-year-old in 1971 and would have had his life, perhaps, brought back to a hurried close.

       That's just one example. Another would be the Shanghai Municipal Police Archives, which we now have the whole set in microfilm in the Yale Sterling Library. These Shanghai Police Archives have enormous amounts of information on Chinese criminal societies. To their great credit, I think, when the British realized that the Communists were going to win in 1949, they made sure that, with American help, these archives were, in fact, trans-shipped just ahead of the Communist divisions to the United States for safekeeping. They languished there, in fact, until they were recently discovered in the National Archives outside Washington.

       That meant that the Communist police couldn't get straight into the archives and start unraveling the various secret society groups. But it did mean that they could do the same kind of back-dating, if they had wanted to start consulting such archives by the later 1970's. They could have found all sorts of connection into worlds of people who were now being punished, if not killed.

       Where we sit here in Luce Hall, we're not far from either of these collections, since we have so much in microfilm from the Foreign Office and we have the whole Shanghai Police file. Just up the hill, within the last four or five years, Martha Smalley and the members of her staff were able to find crucial information on the Japanese rape of Nanjing from 1937, that terrible month of August in 1937. Now, again, something like that could have enormous impact on war crimes trials, or the reevaluation of earlier periods. These are just random examples.

       By coincidence, I just got a communication from the Hoover Institution in Stanford announcing that they are now going to release the personal letters from Chiang Kai Shek on the politics of the Nationalist Party, along with many holdings from the Sung Family. That is the family that Chiang Kai Shek had married into or that Sun Yat Sen had married into, and that one of China's leading industrialists, H. H. Kung, had married into. Those were the famous Sung sisters. Those documents have also now become available through the Hoover Institute. This seems to me a fairly good example of timing, because the family now, the children have died, in most cases. The principals are long dead, and the issues that they represented have faded. Here, the lag time seems to have been intelligently handled. I think they waited until the time was right.

       One thing I ran into a little bit in the American Historical Association was: What are we going to do in the future with 9/11 archives? Is there a hurry about releasing those or is it a good idea not to? Another complicated area is what's going to happen to Homeland Security archives? Who is going to be in charge of that? What information is going to made available? What's going to be done with it? All of these questions fit as part of that framework, as we think of prestige, security, politics and fate. They are linked to this quiet work of our archivists and our librarians.

       Also linked are problems of alteration, of forgeries, the missing pages I mentioned of archives that can be changed, that can be rewritten. This is quite common in some archives that people just reinsert documents and it's sometimes very hard to tell when that has been done. As we've seen very vividly in the last few years, we can get bombing, firing, looting of archives in a sudden moment, as an act of war. It reminded me that in 1949, in fact, the Chinese Communists risked their lives, as has recently been found, to get lists of where the major treasures were stored in Beijing before they trained their artillery on the city.

       Preservation is a risky business. Sometimes, in a combat situation, we can do something about it, but not necessarily. That involves the whole idea of storage. For example, the Taiwan archives were in caves the in mountains. That's how the palace museum collection of paintings was also saved. In World War II, the Chinese put them in caves in the southwest. There's much more to talk about here and we can explore some of that if you'd like to.

       The second common sort of category, I said, was "what constitutes an archive? This isn't obvious at all. I notice one of the definitions in some of our prior material for this meeting talked about "text material" as being dominant, or once being dominant. But even "text material" can cover so many different kinds of things besides paper. It can include fabric, leather, clay and as China's been finding out so dramatically recently, bamboo. They have found that many bamboo slit texts from the fourth century B.C., have preserved hitherto-unknown texts in China. This is very frail, but immensely important textual material that has to be kept in distilled water vacuum tubes once it's dug out. Then there is the whole range of electronic media.

       Archives are also objects. They are artifacts. They are maps, as I mentioned before. They are paintings, as the Yale Medical School knows full well, with incredible paintings of patients treated by Yale doctors in the era before there was photography. This includes the great Peter Parker series of paintings. Parker was a Yale graduate who treated patients in Canton in 1835 to 1840. He had paintings made of their anguish, of the enormous tumors and other sort of violent diseases that they carried with them. These paintings are the record of the medical profession, but also of the sort of social contact of an extraordinary kind.

       Photographs are getting more and more important, I think, now in historical research. When I went to the museum in Amsterdam for the World Socialist Collection there, the curator told me proudly -- and showed me proudly -- that they now have a t-shirt and headband collection, partly inspired by 1989 when much of the political messages was on the headbands that we all got used to seeing on TV. The Dutch decided to collect them, and they have. So that's a different kind of fabric collection, based on textual evidence on garments.

       Now, as we draw these materials together I know everyone here has thought about this a lot, but I don't think we have an answer yet. We have to decide: Are we going to be selective or are we going to be total? If we're going to be total, what exactly does that mean? Does it mean that we're going to be total just on site, with the materials we have more or less under our control or are we going to somehow be total in global circulation? Are we thinking lavishly? I think by the title of our gathering today that this is a very ambitious conference indeed. We're trying to think of the global span, really, of these materials.

       Even if we are being total, what is this worth? What is the worth to us in terms of cost -- straightforward cash -- but also in terms of time and in terms of space? Frank Gehry of ETIS gave a wonderful lecture last night on his architecture. He was telling us of the incredible cost of storing the models that he's made now he's a world-famous architect. I mean, he didn't say that. He is the most modest of men. But, he is a world-famous architect. He said each of his buildings has between 40 and 45 models done by his staff and he's trying to keep them because he wants a sort of archive. However, it's incredibly expensive. One needs huge storage barns for these things. What's to happen after he is gone, are the students going to care and so on? Space, cost and time are crucial to all of these things. The light bulb's a part of this, but only a very, very tiny part.

       If we have local scope, should we somehow concentrate, build our skill around that? For example, should Yale mainly keep Yale artifacts? We could keep many more Yale artifacts if we didn't try and keep everybody else's artifacts. We could cut certain cost corners if we made some complex decisions there. I have no idea what to think about that. We keep a small percent, which is probably just as well, of our faculty archives, but I don't know if it should be more or should be less. We have special holdings, a wonderful, bewildering number of special holdings, but we also have all sorts of other people's special holdings, and I'm not quite sure if we should or not.

       Then how enduring is the technology of circulation? Again, that's obviously one of the key things that you're here to discuss. How do we circulate the information? Should we be circulating mainly finding aids to information or circulating the information itself? I find this a hugely difficult and important area. I was thinking, for instance, of the PRO. Many very fine scholars in different times and in a whole maze of languages have written admirable guides to the structure. For instance, guides to certain sub-branches of the Public Record Office those, probably weren't in print for very long and then they vanished. Those books might well be more important than putting hundreds of feet of just linear pages on some kind of a website. We need finding aids to the finding aids, and then we try and have that collated in some way so that the researcher can be guided through things that exist already. The alternative is redoing all of this all over again, possibly less well than scholars have already done it in the past.

       I recently had an experience, which I am sure that many of you would relate to of being e-mailed by a student who wanted an updated recommendation after a decade. I'd sent my files on him by fax. When I went to the file, it was full of blank sheets of paper. I'd heard about this, but I hadn't actually run into it. Should such things be culled? When or how should an archival collection get rid of file of white paper? Can electronic scanning of various kinds, can it catch all the details? Can it catch all the background material?

       Looking back again to the English, the PRO blank page was at least honest. You know, it said, "Okay. You're not going to get this one, for now." And maybe there was a route later to pursue it. That's a very important discussion topic.

       Another question that occurred to me, partly through friends and partly through knowledge of one or two libraries, is should archives be sold? I don't know how much we've discussed this or if people want to discuss it, but when a collection can no longer be maintained in one place, should it be sold to somewhere else? Should it be sold only to other institutions or to governments or to private collectors or to dealers? I can think of examples of all of these different areas at different times. Who on earth is to make that decision?

       If one buys an archive from somewhere else, do you have an obligation, automatically, to circulate it? Again, I don't know. The equivalent with a private painting collection would be no. It's very ambiguous. If you buy a collection, you can keep it locked up in your basement, or wherever. In fact, Frank Gehry is building art museums with rooms off them in those great, wonderful metallic spirals, so that people can have their private collections in little wings attached to the main public collection. He's very excited by what this might say about museums of the future, a sort of selected access to certain areas and a magnificent sort of public space, truly public space, dominating the whole thing.

       I remember noticing in the University of Texas at Austin in the incredible humanities center there. Just by chance, I was introduced to some of the documents. I started rummaging around looking for certain things, and I found that Austin, I think, had bought the entire collection from the British Museum, of the original signed book receipts. In Britain you have to send one copy of all your books to the British Museum, as it was then called before it was the British Library. In browsing in Austin, I found, to my complete amazement, that the senior librarian used to acknowledge all of those books in longhand. I found a couple of books that my grandfather and grandmother had written, books that have not endured, I'm afraid. There was a neat thank you note; one dated 1901, I think, and the other early 1902, in elegant hand.

       I guess the British Museum was clearing this out. You could say such things have no value at all. But, yet, they've got a lot of value. I mean, here's somebody trying to make a brief judgment. He was too polite to say, "Got your book." He'd say, "I got your charming book about your family and how are you doing? I seem to remember you gave us a book two years ago," that kind of thing. It's the edges of important, and yet, it somehow is a slice of social life. It has its own meaning, I think; its own force. There are countless other examples we might be able to share together.

       Linked to this whole idea, I think, of the archive itself is, if we can answer all these other questions is should we pay? Should the viewer pay to see them? If so, how? How do we decide that question? I know this has been debated for a decade now, what do you pay for which bit of information from the Internet, and so on. Of course, as some historians know, and, in particular, in some parts of the world, how much should you pay to get access to a country's public archives when a curator asks you for a certain sum? Should you always refuse that or should you occasionally accept? What is the acceptable level? If that is graft, what is the acceptable level? A dollar a page? A penny a thousand pages? Either way, it can add up. We've had students run into that problem in countries I'll leave nameless, but it's a very prevalent practice now and it supplements archivists' incomes very nicely. If it gets too high, then we call it gouging or criminal activity. However, we don't know really know what we're talking about here. I'm not sure what the limits should be.

       How do we prevent misuse? That, again, is so hard. Do we vet the people looking at material? Do we never do it or do we sometimes do it, going back to my first criteria?

       The last of these three I would like to mention archival dispersal and the problem of universality. Should archives be concentrated and, if so, how? Is the web or electronic communication going to be where they can be concentrated? To some extent it's already happening, I know that. But what about the different ways that people have done this in the past? One may see it with the very venerable institutions, like the Public Record Office, for instance, or major museums and archives in China. The PRO used to be pretty much in one jammed space, if I remember rightly, in Chancery Lane. Things were chaotic and, as I said, it was subterranean. It was pretty much pitch dark and it was feudal, etc. But you had all the documents there from the Foreign Office. You had all kinds of sub-departments of government. You also had enormous amounts of rare old newspapers there and you have all kinds of back-up reports.

       Then, I think it was probably in the Thatcher years, there was the decision to disperse such collections throughout the city to stop them being concentrated in one particular area. So now we have this extraordinary system. If you want to try and look at 19th century British history of China, you have to go to Kew Gardens, which are attractive, but not that easy to get to on the underground from somewhere remotely central, with long waits and several changes of trains -- three, I think, to get to Kew, unless you want to hike across the bridge from Chissey. It takes some time to get to Chissey.

       Once you get there, you've got the most state-of-the-art situation. It's wonderful. You get a private pager which, if you're me, goes off at the wrong time. But the things come gliding out; no more trolleys and this kind of thing. But at the moment, it's harder to find things, not easier. I'm sure however that's all being tackled nicely.

       Then you decide you want the newspaper and you'll find the newspapers are in Colindale. Well, okay, so I shouldn't sneer at Colindale. I don't know much about it. But it's even further than Kew and completely in the other direction. The cost of getting to each these archives is considerable and you could spend at least three hours a day just traveling between them trying to check some quite small item. In this case, dispersal doesn't seem to be immensely helpful. It would be useful to have these things still kept together. I think there is a lack on the whole of very careful central organization. I won't go through the Chinese, the complex warfare split of Tibavus's (sp?) Beijing, the Beijing split with Shanghai and Nunjing and so on. All the different kinds of problems they're facing there.

       On the subject of dispersal I've been talking more about historical archives and that sort of archival holdings, but I was thinking of other kinds of holdings, as well. One that I ran into briefly is, "what are the archival values of all the unused material for television networks?" I once had a wonderful faculty internship arranged by CBS one summer when I was just allowed to prowl around. The one thing I noticed, as an historian, was they had a kind of a bank of tapes for every single show that had actually gone on the air, there were thousands and thousands of feet of tapes for every show that went on the air, but they only kept the tapes for about six months. I asked, "Wasn't there any way to store it?" Their answer was, "How? Where? Who's going to pay for it? Why should we bother?" They'll keep the actual shows, but not all this background material. "Nobody wants it because we didn't use it." But how do you know they're not going to want it? They couldn't answer me, but said, unless you want to pay for it and somehow remove it there's no way.

       I was thinking of the way businesses handle these things. Business archives, from my experience, have a much longer lifetime than diplomatic archives and politically charged archives. It can be incredibly hard to get even century-old records from certain kinds of businesses, where competition is still fierce.

       Another part of dispersal seems to me important is the language of the material you are distributing. Are we concentrating here on English-language material? Or are we genuinely making an attempt to get every other country's languages in this? Are we thinking of possible translation factors? Are there going to be voice-recognition translations or automatic translation? Can we do this? What happens when something is translated?

       Obviously, in a way, we don't think of all the English archives being translated into French, or something like that, but I was thinking that, in China, a lot of the archives of the last dynasty, the Ching, are, in fact, written in Manchu, which is a largely unknown language now. Globally it is not spoken by more than a handful of people and a few scholars. This was a 270-year dynasty and the one that was crucially involved with the British in those other events that I've been discussing. If we were to circulate Manchu materials on the web, it would be historically accurate, but it would raise a good many strange problems. It would be close to an absurdity for many scholars, particularly because the Chinese have already translated all the known Manchu imperial documents into Chinese. We would actually be circulating a language that's largely a dead language, but is the true archive, when you've actually got a Chinese translation already in place. Of course, one is not sure if the Chinese translation is totally accurate. I can imagine this happening in countless ways in different part of the world as we try and get this comprehensiveness that Alice's program talks about.

       I want to end with this idea of ambience, or what we lose by centralizing, by globalizing, and so on. This may just be too sentimental, but, still, I'll mention it. The old way, that is, going to a place and seeing what they had and then reading it there, took you to another town in this country or took you to another country. So the act of consulting or thinking about an archive took into account some variables of the country that produced the archive, and of a surrounding where the same language was spoken -- unless it was a dead language -- where you'd get a sense of what life was like in the region that had created the documents that interest you.

       Obviously, everybody who did this kind of research would have their favorite moments. A good bit of time after I'd done the Public Record Office or the Taiwan experience, I did research on a book on an early 18th century Chinese man who'd come to France. I went to Paris on my own recognizance, to follow up various leads. There was quite a lot written about this man by various French scholars. That took me to the Bibliotheque Nacional, the old one, and the archives in the Palace Soubise and the foreign office archives in the Quai D'orsey. I can still remember vividly those parts of Paris, the restaurants in the squares off each one; where one went to eat, what one talked about, how you randomly met friends and other scholars from all over the world if you had a bit of diligence, a bit of courage, and a bit of shared, not terribly good, French. The fun of this was a sense of sharing something, a longer timeframe, somehow more intimate globally. It was truly wonderful.

       A few years later, when I was studying Mateo Richie, the great Jesuit missionary in 16th century China, I couldn't resist going to Rome and trying to find out what had been preserved about him. This led me to the Vatican Archives and the joy of just strolling past a Swiss guard, which is considerable, I think. As is doing the reading in a room about 90 feet long with an oak floor, literally just next to the Sistine Chapel, just cheek by jowl with that, a little sort of courtyard with its own restaurants and so on. Again, there was a sense of camaraderie, the sharing of knowledge is just -- it's wonderful. Of course, some people get a bit cross now and again and researchers scream a bit and so on, but the general sense of the relationships between people with a shared task, I think, is important. That kind of work is not solitary in the same way as other kinds of research might be, I think. And you can find all sorts of material by chance, or by accident, or by a sympathetic curator that you can build on. And I won't go into examples like that, but they were very precious.

       So that question would be rephrased, maybe, should the country tell us about the archives we're investigating in some way? Should we, somehow, try and hold onto some of that? Or, is total recall the way we're going go, so they'll no longer be any need to travel and to broaden our experience. If so, there will surely be losses as well as gain. We'll have to try and think this through, together.

       The final thought is just a practical one. It seems that all the world's knowledge simply cannot be stored and retained and recorded. I think we should be realistic about that. There's just no way to do it without becoming a Borges short story. You just can't do it. You can't do it. We've got to select. We all select countless, hundreds of millions of times every day, with all our relationships, the things we write, and change, and wipe out, and so on. This is all part of our lives. We know that technology is not perfect. We're pretty sure it's not even permanent. Anybody who's changed computers often, even somebody as klutzy as me, knows this. I mean, all those hard-learned systems are already vanished from five or six years ago.

       So modesty is in order, I guess, would be my closing thoughts. Modesty is in order, coupled with an imaginative sense of the past and the different ways we can learn from trying to study it, whether it's for our present needs or for the future.

       Thank you.

Jonathan Spence is Sterling Professor of History at Yale University. He teaches in the field of Chinese history from around 1600 to the present and on Western images of China since the middle ages. Recognized as one of the foremost scholars of Chinese civilization from the 16th century to the present, Spence has written extensively on the role of history in shaping modern China. His critically acclaimed The Search for Modern China has become one of the standard texts on the last several hundred years of Chinese history. His recent works include a biography of Mao Zedong and Treason by the Book, exploring an intriguing episode of 18th-century history. His research often takes him to many Chinese Universities.

Jonathan Spence is president of the American Historical Association for the 2004-2005 term. A native of England, Spence holds a bachelor's degree from Cambridge University and master's and doctoral degrees from Yale. He began teaching at Yale in 1965 and was named the Sterling Professor of History in 1993. His many honors include the William C. DeVane Medal of the Yale Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in 1978; the Los Angeles Times History Prize in 1982; and the Vursel Prize of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983. Spence was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985. He was a MacArthur Fellow in 1988, and that year was appointed to the Council of Scholars at the Library of Congress. In June 2001, he was made a Companion of the Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George, an honor given by the Queen of England for outstanding achievement.

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