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<gwalsh@bu.edu>
Professor Carruthers' comments on the differing roles and purposes of
heritage and history are especially vital when considered in the context
of increasingly fluid, changeable and ephemeral written records in
electronic formats. As a librarian, I see almost daily the problems
researchers of history encounter as they try to collect data from the
past. Narratives may survive in abundance, but the raw material, the
truly primary resources more often do not.
Preservation and accessibility of information is always at the mercy of
decisions made by people whose first thought is not necessarily the study
of the past and the documentation needed to do so. Those decisions may be
made on wholly practical grounds, with no ideological motives. We all know
the need to clean out attics and closets and file cabinets to make room
for newer accumulations of possessions and records, and even if one saves
every letter and memo, few people make them publicly available, much less
accessible through indexing. Yet it is contemporary letters and journals,
and government and business records that allow historians to sift through
the minutiae, find relationships and form theories of what really happened
in the past and why.
Preservers of heritage, as Carruthers has distinguished it from history,
have an easier time. They know what they want to save, and if none of the
minutiae of life's records have survived, there is always the folk memory.
Indeed, often the folk memory is preferred to the records of the past.
My concern is slightly tangential to Carruthers'. Electronic information
technology has done two things:
It has made it exceptionally easy, at least in some parts of the world,
for researchers to discover articles and text from a few thousand major
journals. While information resources proliferate, the products do not
vary much in content. The journals and other resources that are not
available electronically are increasingly marginalized. These include most
journals published in Africa, and most small, highly specialized journals
and working papers. Librarians struggle to counteract this trend, but
it's looking more and more like a losing struggle.
In addition, the great anonymous Information Superhighway makes it
increasingly easy to promote a point of view, misquote, plagiarize, spread
disinformation. Much of what is on the Internet is NOT disinformation, but
how is one to be sure? Particularly a student with immature critical
powers of discernment.
Heritage is certainly not evil - I'm proud enough of my several ethnic
identities, and enjoy those of others, but I agree with Carruthers that
heritage is not history, and we must be vigilant to maintain the
distinction and to show it to our students.
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
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