I have the deliver my inaugural lecture soon. My first inaugural, if that makes sense. Some people are already on their third. Actually four of us are going to give our inaugurals on the same day, at one mega-event (sounds to me like hard work for the audience). My institution used to have a prescriptively small number of profs, but over the last few years we have gone to the opposite extreme. Which means that inaugurals now have to be processed in batches. Opinions are divided on this. Let’s see how it goes – we may all decide, after the event, that it was a really great idea.

As one prepares for such a thing, one has in mind to use a few things out of the archive. This is where the problem starts – where is all that stuff? As an old person, brought up in the paper and acetate era, there are things that I believe I still have (old slides, drawings, notebooks, copies of papers, annotations, etc.), but half of them don’t seem to be where one imagines they should be. So this has resulted in a large amount of time and effort spent looking for things at work, in old box files that haven’t been opened for a decade or two, at home, in the loft, etc. It’s been physically demanding. I’ve found piles of stuff that I had completely forgotten about (and which, if I’m honest, is all largely irrelevant). But there are things I’m looking for that I just can’t seem to find. It’s not that I want to use all, or any, of them – I just want to know where they are!

Anyway, this got me thinking about the profs of the future (maybe even now, for the true genii out there). Presumably their equivalent of my predicament will be time spent sitting in front of a computer trawling through old electronic documents, images, pdfs etc. Not quite the physical effort I am talking about but, nonetheless, potentially just as daunting or frustrating. What if the files are no longer readable? Or otherwise corrupted? What if they had a catastrophic computer crash a few years previously? (shouldn’t be a problem, because we always back things up, don’t we?). And what about the profs who, even further into the future, look back at the e-profs with utter disdain?

The pace of change is so great with technological advances that it is really difficult to think too far forward in time in terms of how we are likely to conduct business in the future. But then, scribble on bits of paper still looks almost as good today as it did in the last century, and it doesn’t require any batteries to read it (unlike those audio cassettes that are now unreadable on account of me getting rid of all the cassette players; the solution here is quite simple – I’m getting rid of all the cassettes as well).

But where is that packet of photographs!?