INFORMATION CAN BE A BURIED TREASURE

A few weeks after we left our then-18-year-old son off at the University of North Carolina in 2005, we got a note from him, thoroughly excited about having discovered something called microfiche. For those of you for whom that technology is long forgotten, it was a way to see originals of documents on a transparent card – using a so-called microfiche reader -- in order to gain access to long forgotten archives of magazines, newspapers and other sources of information.

By that time, the Internet had already become ubiquitous and Google and other search engines were increasingly turned to as the be-all, end-all source of information.  But he had discovered the joy of deep-digging research, using original documents that could never be found online, but represented a kind of buried treasure for a diligent researcher..

We were thinking about this the other day when we were chatting with someone about the fact that AI is rapidly becoming the current equivalent of Google as the source for all the information in the world.

Increasingly, researchers in the realm of state and local government and elsewhere are turning to AI to give them the information they need to help write reports or even make important decisions.

But there’s a problem. What AI can find for you is information that has been digitized. But there’s tons of valuable material that’s never been put in digital form. That includes information about groups and cultures, with histories that have been written about less and never picked up by the digitizers of the world.  

We’ve become acutely aware of this when we consider the articles we wrote for the now defunct magazine, Financial World. This work includes the predecessor to the Government Performance Project, (published in Governing magazine and sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts). Boxloads full of information  accompanied those evaluations of cities, counties and states, but unless we can find the original publication (we have a bunch, but they’re hidden away in boxes), they might not have been written at all. Financial World went out of business in 1998.

For the purposes of this B&G Report, we checked to make sure the preceding paragraph was accurate. So, we used Perplexity, one of our favorite AI Tools and searched using the prompt, “Tell me about work done evaluating cities in Financial World Magazine.”

The response it spat out instantaneously began with “CEOWORLD magazine evaluates cities through its International Financial Centers Index. . . . ”

That had nothing to do with the years of work we put into our Financial World efforts – which we immodestly believe, could be of huge use to anyone who wants to delve deeply into the history of topics like performance measurement.

We fear that as researchers increasingly rely on AI for their work, much material that is of value will become lost to future generations.

Sometimes, the best repositories of information are in the minds of the human beings who were around at the time. There are multiple one-on-one conversations with people who have recounted memories that were never scanned.

We’ll boast a bit and give an example of the kind of research we’re talking about. Long ago, when we were writing a biography of Walt Disney, we grew intrigued with his favorite teacher, Miss Daisy A . Beck.

Previous biographers had taken note of her existence, and referred to some correspondence he had with her, which could be found in the Disney Archives. But that was about it. We thought that since she was such an important influence on him (she encouraged his drawing) we’d dig a little more.

Fortuitously, we discovered that her aged niece and that woman’s son were still living near Kansas City, Missouri, and that they’d be willing to visit with us. We learned that Daisy Beck was “a stylishly dressed woman in her late 30s,” at the time, and that she coached the track team. Though he was no athlete, we were able to write that she urged Walt to try out for track and she’d tell him “Hop right out there at recess and show me what you can do.”

We looked Daisy Beck up on Perplexity and although the AI tool told us who she was and the usual stuff from other biographies, you won’t find any of that there.

Robert Caro, author of the Powerbroker, and the first four of a five-book biography of Lyndon Johnson has no parallel in this kind of work and though his diligent research is out-of-reach for most biographers, his digging for details shows how much treasured information is buried away.

As he wrote in the Paris Review, The “LBJ Presidential Library is just massive. The last time I was there, they had forty-four million pieces of paper. These shelves go back, like, a hundred feet. And there are four floors of these red buckram boxes. His congressional papers run 144 linear feet. Which is 349 boxes. A box can hold eight hundred pages. I was able to go through all of those, though it took a long, long time.”

Will future journalists, authors and students continue to dig? It used to be said that history is written by the winners. Now, we fear it will be written by the digitizers.

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