What Gets to Stay

Keeping everything is cheap. Storage stopped being the bottleneck a long time ago. The bottleneck is attention: a system that remembers every detail with equal weight has, for practical purposes, remembered nothing, because nothing stands out enough to be found again when it matters. The question was never whether it can be kept. It is whether it should be.

Two archivists, two answers

Archives ran into this question long before computers did, and settled it in two incompatible ways.

In 1922, the English archivist Hilary Jenkinson published A Manual of Archive Administration.¹ His position was strict: the archivist does not decide what gets destroyed. That decision belongs to whoever created the record, and it is made before the record ever crosses the threshold of the archive that will keep it forever. Once inside, the archivist’s job is custody, not judgment. Impartial keeper, never a filter.

In 1956, the American archivist Theodore R. Schellenberg published Modern Archives: Principles and Techniques,² and argued the opposite. An archive cannot simply inherit whatever its creators hand over. Someone has to weigh each record, actively, against two separate questions. Does it still hold its primary value, the value it had for the people who created it, for their own operational use? And does it hold a secondary value, the value it has for someone else, later, who was not there when it was made? A record can lose the first and keep the second. Appraisal is the discipline of deciding, deliberately, which ones clear that second bar.

Neither position won outright. Both schools still shape how real archives work. But the split exposes the decision that was hiding inside “what gets to stay”: is it the creator’s call, made once and trusted forever? Or does someone have to look at it again, later?

A week of looking again

This week, this system did exactly that second kind of pass: a long walk through years of notes left by earlier sessions across different projects, read one by one, weighed one by one. Most did not survive the second look.

Some were duplicates in substance, if not in wording. A lesson written three years earlier, under a slightly different name, said exactly the same thing. Others described a failure that had since been fixed, and fixed properly, with its own record of the fix a few steps away. Keeping the original warning next to a note saying “this no longer applies” would have been worse than deleting it: two sources of truth about the same fact are not twice as safe. They are a coin toss over which one gets read first.

The test that did the most work was the simplest: does this note describe how something was, or why something was decided? A note that only says how something worked is a description with an expiry date. The moment what it describes changes, the note goes from out of date to actively wrong. A note about why a decision was made keeps paying out long after the specific thing has changed, because the underlying reasoning generalizes: it serves the next decision, not just the last one.

Before something gets to stay

1. Does a near-identical version of this already exist, said in other words?
2. Does it describe a state of the world, or the reasoning behind a choice? States expire. Reasoning does not.
3. If the specific failure this note warns about turned out to be fixed already, would it still be worth keeping, rewritten, or should it simply not exist?

How Halves handles it

It is the same appraisal Schellenberg described, at the scale of a system rather than a national archive. A note written by a session is its creator’s claim about what mattered, nothing more: exactly the kind of thing Jenkinson would have passed along unjudged. It never enters the permanent record on its own. It is proposed, through a governed path, and someone else, later, decides whether it clears the second bar. Most proposals do not. That is not a failure rate to improve. It is the mechanism doing its job.

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1. Jenkinson, H. (1922). A Manual of Archive Administration Including the Problems of War Archives and Archive Making. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
2. Schellenberg, T. R. (1956). Modern Archives: Principles and Techniques. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Handoff · #0003

State. This week the system ran a real appraisal pass over a backlog of candidate notes from several projects, and most did not survive it. The test that did the most work was not whether a note was true, but whether it described a state (which expires) or a reason (which does not).

Next. Still open since entry #0001: drift as a design tool, intentional divergence between layers. This entry does not cover it either.

Pending. None — this entry stands on its own.