There are members of our Sherlockian legion who are much more organized than I. Some are even librarians or archivists with a professional sense of how things should be sorted, accounted for, and generally kept for the future. Me, I go for the old Sherlock Holmes system of allowing things to pile up, waiting for some rainy day to put them into some semblance of order. And being a Sherlockian can leave you with plenty of piles that need sorting.

While books on a shelf are what we think of when we first look at a Sherlockian collection, this hobby produces so many tidbits that get handed out on single eight and a half by eleven sheets. As long as Sherlockians have had access to any means of print reproduction, we’ve taken advantage of it. Flyers, quizzes, programs, postcards, lists, fake telegrams, papers for reading along with presentations . . . things that one doesn’t really want to part with.

In considering a modern web information depot like a wiki, I’ve been thinking of all those bits and how so much of that data might be good to revisit. But revisiting a mass of paper that has never been organized tends to make one feel obligated to deal with it. But how?

Looking through all the papers that I’ve accumulated over time, I was amazed at how many of them brought back memories of other times and places. Workshops I’d gone to, controversies that popped up and faded, books being released for the first time. And realizing how many of them were just that for me . . . keys to memory . . . I decided that the best filing system was simply to start creating little file boxes of individual years.

I’m horrible about placing moments of my past in a given year. During my filing process, I mentioned a bit from an undated letter that my buddy Rad wrote to him and he immediately cited the year the events in that letter occurred. I could never do such a thing, save for those events in one’s life that are always referenced: birth, wedding, BSI investiture (yes, as much as I grouse that we place too much importance on that little certificate, it does stick with one). And as all the papers in my collection will probably be used more as memory-triggers than true reference, filing by year seems to be the thing that will suit me best.

What about indexing it all for reference, one might ask? Well, this is where I start coming back to the Sherlockian wiki idea. Collecting tidbits on the internet (with years mentioned, of course) not only makes it accessible to one’s self, but to the rest of the world as well. Suddenly a young Sherlockian who’s only been to a few local scion meetings can find out what a local Sherlockian across the country talked to his club about at a particular meeting in the mid-1980s.

We’re living in a world where sharing information has become easier than ever. The music, movie, and publishing industries are having serious issues coming to grips with this, demonizing the word “sharing” a bit as they fight to retain copyrights. And as we start harnessing this great sharing power we now have, we all have to be aware of copyrights, what constitutes a violation and what doesn’t. But in the end, that ability is still there. Information can be passed between enthusiasts in a given field more easily than ever before.

As we give more attention to archiving our papers and our history, as efforts at the Minneapolis, Toronto, and BSI collections are doing, we should also be giving attention to spreading the bits of data those papers contain, and letting our fellows know who came up with all these marvelous ideas.

Looking through the past, I could’t help but think of the future. As frail as I’ve heard people say web pages are, all these single sheets . . .  paper that could look a lot like trash for the waste basket to any passing non-Sherlockian eye and lost in a moment of clean-up . . . have a fragile quality as well.

Kind of like all our memories, but that’s a part of their beauty.

Your humble correspondent,

Brad Keefauver