We have become all too accustomed to thinking that the full spectrum of human knowledge is at our fingertips, that a swift Google search is all that stands between us and an infinite store of information.
But the release of a trove of documents from the Military Service Pensions Collection (MSPC) demonstrates the fallacy behind this notion – the accumulated stories, data and evidence add so much detail to the narrative of this State’s difficult birth, and serves as a useful reminder that so much of our shared history is preserved in analogue, captured only on paper in storage facilities.
The importance of the information released points to the invaluable work of archivists. As Prof Diarmaid Ferriter put it in yesterday’s Irish Times, the release “involved an awesome effort on the part of a small number of archivists based in the Cathal Brugha Barracks in Dublin, who have had to tackle the processing, cataloguing and digitisation of a collection that amounts to nearly 300,000 files”.
That awesome effort isn’t the preserve of the MSPC archivists – all the staff who catalogue, digitise and preserve our documented history play a vital role in preserving our sense of ourselves.
In their work, we see the immense value of human curation, and the folly of relying solely on computer algorithms to determine the value of information.