Only Collect « a historian’s craft
http://idlethink.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/only-collect/

The work is: Only Collect; that is to say, collect everything, indiscriminately. You're five years old. Don't presume too much to know what’s important and what isn’t. Photocopy journal articles, photograph archives; create bibliographies, buy books; make notes on every article or book you read, even if it's just one line saying "Never read this again"; collect newspaper clippings and email them to yourself; collect quotes; save your ideas for future papers, future projects, future conferences, even if they seem wildly implausible now. Hoarding must become instinctual, it must be an uncontrollable, primal urge. And the higher, civilizing impulse that kicks in after the fact is organization, or librarianship.

his should be a fledgling historian’s maxim & I wish someone had told me this earlier. When you start out studying history — when you begin as a graduate historian, you are nothing; you are not even the history books you’ve already read, because you’ve probably misunderstood or not appreciated some fundamental aspect of them.

I've long held this philosophy. "You’re five years old. Don’t presume too much to know what’s important and what isn’t. Photocopy journal articles, photograph archives; create bibliographies, buy books; make notes on every article or book you read, even if it’s just one line saying “Never read this again”; collect newspaper clippings and email them to yourself; collect quotes; save your ideas for future papers, future projects, future conferences, even if they seem wildly implausible now. Hoarding must become instinctual, it must be an uncontrollable, primal urge."

"Here, there’s one more point I could make: time fine-tunes your collecting habits. You are a predator of sources. Over time, things will start to jump out at you. For a lionness in the savannah on the hunt, the merest movement in the grass is a stimulus to action, but she has learned to distinguish between the random twitches of the landscape and the presence of prey. In the library and the archive, the hunt is as much a matter of skill as of instinct. In short, until you’re an adult lion, jump at everything"

"Craftsmanship is a preservation method That's why "being famous" is a great way to preserve your work—because value is the #1 preservative for old objects. But want to know another? Craftsmanship. One of the great hazards of survival through time is the lack of a market and a lack of trade value, but another is simply shoddiness. (I have to chuckle whenever I read yet another description of American frontier log cabins as having been well crafted or sturdily or beautifully built. The much more likely truth is that 99% of frontier log cabins were horribly built—it's just that all of those fell down. The few that have survived intact were the ones that were well made. That doesn't mean all of them were.) It's not just that things that are poorly made deteriorate more readily, it's also that they signal their own worthlessness."

"One of the problems of historical preservation is that people only tend to preserve things that are valuable. And the problem with that is that value fluctuates over time."

really interesting article on the "trough of no value": you buy something it decreases in value until it has no value, but then after a while it has valuer as an antique