Beat poet Allen Ginsberg spent his life as, well - a Beat poet. Easy to imagine, it wasn't filled with luxurious excess in material terms, but it was certainly filled with luxurious excess in experiential terms. He seemed to be at every cultural nexus of the last century. And late in life, the money came as well.

After winning the National Book Award, he received a remarkable advance for his forthcoming work and subsequently was paid roughly a million dollars to donate all his papers to Stanford University. When he passed away in 1997, he was part of the first generation where to leave one's "papers" would extend beyond the limits of paper alone.

Twelve hundred linear feet of library space at Stanford is filled with 50 years of correspondence, notebooks and journals, manuscripts and business and financial records. There are teaching materials and political files, periodicals and clippings, memorabilia and posters - not to mention artwork, music and something curiously named "printed ephemera." There are 78,000 photographic images taken or set up by Ginsberg, along with some 150 videos brought together by documentary filmmaker Jerry Aronson. And yes, there are also computer files.

The website for the collection reports that "More than 80% of this original material is unreleased and exists uniquely in this archive." Rather exciting until you read that the "Materials in the Department of Special Collection are non-circulating and must be used in the Special Collections' Reading Room," followed closely by, "Photocopies, photographs, and microfilm can be made of some materials in the collections."

There's nothing untoward about any of this; in fact, it's standard procedure for these unique and prized collections. It's just that in these days of digital everything, one wonders if it's time for a change.

Some of this change we can't avoid. Decades from now, many original documents will be digital from the start. And it's hard to argue that something in digital form shouldn't be made instantly available to everyone over the Internet. And even if they are restricted to a few public exhibits of selected materials, we're likely to see large-print emails mounted on poster board, the exact interchange in which significant person A and significant person B, actually came together to say, solve world hunger. And I suppose there will be the obligatory side-by-side foggy cellphone pics taken at a time and place only later to be determined as historically significant.

There is challenge here, as well. History is a richly networked fabric of people, thought, motivations and more, and technology not only drives the story, it can also reveal it. For a person like Ginsberg, who careened through the birth of present-day culture and perspective, there is much to be learned from the detritus of his life. What paper was that "printed ephemera" printed on? What ink? Only the original will tell. Not its digital copy.

I don't envy historians or curators on this point. What must be protected in the original? And what can be digitally recorded, and the original thrown away? There's no denying there is something cold about every recording technology. The picture of a laughing child emotes joy, but only to an observer, only when a human is involved.

Fortunately, digital technology guards that important family photo just as steadfastly as it guards the next one, where Dad mistakenly pointed the camera down at his shoe. The family archivist knows which photo to cull, but for the curator, only time will tell which picture will become important. This becomes monumentally overwhelming when anyone can take 78,000 digital photos in a few years rather then an entire lifetime

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.

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