electronic cross referencing

The big question which comes to mind with this week’s reading is ‘can it be made simpler’?  Granted, this too much after the computer experts explain what all goes into on-line indexing, or the syllibi project.  For techies this is brilliant, for those of us without such grand vision it is eye-crossing.  Still I can see how this could positively affect my own webpage idea.  My topic of 19th century women doctors in the West could be referenced to many other relevant information sources - even separating out each word of the title as it’s own subject.

personal papers

Personal electronic archiving….hmmm.  This has been a concern of mine ever since signing into my first e-mail account.  I’ve had the privilege of sorting all my grandparents things after their deaths and have grown a huge appreciation even for scraps of paper with small notes that give some flavor of their personalities.  A couple generations later and most of my communication with family members and friends is through e-mail.  My solution to the possible loss problem has been to save most of the conversations.  There are seven folders in my e-mail account labeled ‘family,’ ‘relatives,’ ‘friends’ I spend some time going through the older e-mails and stashing the thread with the complete conversation on it.  Sounds time consuming, but if it were a snail mail conversation I’d do the same thing.  I know no one else in my family does this and am pretty sure none of my friends do.  Years and years of personality, events and life in general would be lost if I didn’t.  Soon as I figure out how to burn CDs on my laptop I’ll get it all onto a disk – and hope to migrate that information to future technology.