The Legacy Archive- a concept whose time has come?
I'm astounded- I seem to have struck a chord with a great many people here with my last thread. As I've read the replies and seen the incredible number of recs it occurred to me it may be time to put forward an idea I've been nursing in my mind for a few years now. It's something I even posted about once before in this forum a long time ago.
It's a fairly simple thing- my idea is to begin a video archive consisting of people recording an honest account of who they are as a legacy to be handed down to the following generations. Kind of like a time capsule, it would be a way to let their children and their children's children know about themselves and to give a description of their lives for posterity's sake.
In my mind it would be a database created by and maintained by a scholarly organization such as a university. It could be something like a YouTube system, only without all the tricks, pranks, and meaningless noise generated by millions of people waving their pocket video cameras about. Its one purpose would be to leave a generational legacy for the future in an honest and consistent manner.
I see three possibilities- 1) A video that the person leaves open to anyone who wishes to access it. 2) A passworded video with the password being handed down to future family members in a will or other secure method so only the family may view their family history. 3) A passworded video with the addition of permission for scholars and anthropologists to open and view the video for study of past generations.
The video would be created in two sections- the first would be to answer a standardized questionnaire (to be developed). The second section would simply be the person saying anything they want- describing themselves, their careers, their victories and defeats- in short, anything the would wish to say about themselves and their lives so future generations would have the means to see and understand their family's past.
For the past couple years I've been gathering together as many of my family's old photos as I can so I could scan them and put them in a digital format to preserve the fading history of my family. It's been an enchanting, haunting, fascinating process to look so closely at all the ghosts of my past and see them staring back at me in sepia and fading black and white. The only thing that's missing is their voices. I see faces on a screen but hear no voices telling me who they were and what their lives were like.
The Legacy Archive could add a new dimension to the preservation of the past if done in a logical, scholarly manner. The more people contributing their lives to the Archive, the fuller the past would become for those who will come after we are gone to dust.
Ideas? Comments? Criticisms? Good idea or bad?
Think about it.
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