This evening I finished putting information from the third (and final) school log book onto the centenary timeline that I created (using the excellent Timeglider online generator) to celebrate the recent events at school.
Looking back through those log books has done something very strange. It has made me feel like I know the previous headteachers who wrote the (almost) daily entries within the pages of the book. I can imagine seeing Mr Griffin standing over a local field, blowing his school whistle and warning the children that they have 10 minutes to get to school, and leave the downed aeroplane alone (November 1st, 1917), and I can feel the sense of terror as the children are forced to spend the school day sitting in the air raid shelters as enemy bombers fly overhead (1941).
As I worked my way through the decades, I learnt what each school teacher was like. The trips they took their classes on, the training events that they went too. It was fascinating reading throughout, as I pulled out the information that I could use in a public timeline.
And then tonight I reached the end of log book 3, but it wasn't the most recent school entry. It was back in 1992. And the reason for 1992 being the final year that the log book was written in was there for me to read in black and white;
"The requirement to maintain a school log book ended at this time (1992), although some schools continue to keep one. The head of Porchester however declines to keep one as a much fuller account of school life lies within the daily diary and in the hard disc of computers. It remains to be seen however, how much of this 'new' evidence will be seen by future generations. The reasons for this headteacher refusing to continue the log however reside in the ever increasing amounts of fruitless bureaucracy."
I read that comment - and I have to agree with the words that the previous school Headteacher wrote, because there is nothing of the life of the school since 1992 that I can get to and put onto the timeline.
That is a real shame for our own school timeline, but it also serves as a warning about digitising everything too, because if you don't keep hold of the data that you've digitised, you've lost it forever. And even if you do keep hold of what you have digitised, the format might become redundant. I'm sure some of those records from the early 1990's would have been stored intially on 3.5" diskettes, or ZIP discs, or even CDRoms. But where are those disks now?
That period of time between the ending of the log book and the use of the internet to archive every piece of data every entered onto it - thanks to google's spiders and other archiving bots too - has resulted in a black hole of lost data. It's the equivalent of early historical records stopping once the Romans left Britain, and before the Normans once again undertook the process of recording information in their Doomsday project. Back then it was known as the Dark ages, as so little was understood of the time through lack of records.
That's what we've created between log books ending, and internet archiving. We've created a digital dark age, where events that occured during that period have been lost. It's a shame. It's a real shame, and one that I wouldn't have even thought about had it not been for the schools centenary celebrations. I would have still been one of those digital natives raving about using digital technologies everywhere. But now, now I'm not so sure. Maybe there is still a place for those "analogue" technologies like writing with a pen in a book. A book will survive. A book is timeless. A book won't become imcompatible with time (unless the world underwent a major language and communication change).
So, because when Mr Griffin retired he logged his leaving celebration, I can say I really hoped that he enjoyed his smokers cabinet at home during his retirement. But I can't say the same for Mr. Elwell when he retired. For he left the school once the log books had stopped, and his leaving celebration was not recorded.
1992 - 2000(ish) : The Digital Dark Ages
Oh, and yes I am aware that I have put all the information into a digital media, but we have the first two school log books stored with the County Archives, and the third book will be going there shortly too.
