Smoke
August 28th, 2003A cigarette card inspired the redesign of this site. The smoking girl above is printed on one of thousands of such cards from The George Arents Collection on Tobacco held by The New York Public Library. Parts of the Arents collection will be published in the NYPL Digital Gallery, a database of hundreds of thousands of visual materials from the NYPL. The Gallery is one of the major projects I have been working on this year. Keep your eyes peeled for more news on the launch.
George Arents collected materials relating to the history, literature, and lore of tobacco over a sixty-year period before the collection was brought to the NYPL. Many of the important collections in research libraries like New York Public were started by individuals and then turned over to trusted repositories. The work of individuals like Arents is one of the things that preserves our historical record.
Some librarians and archivists wonder if the same mechanism might preserve our digital legacy. It may be some time before libraries and museums can collect and preserve digital material on a scale that mirrors print collections. In the interim, it may be the digital pack rat who save the good stuff for us.