The Cursive Divide

Archivists of a certain age (your humble correspondent included) grew up in a world where kids in kindergarten were routinely handed a thick pencil, a sheet of highly acidic ruled paper, and instructed how to block out the letters of the alphabet. Years later, under the patient guidance of different teachers, these ancient archivists also learned to pencil their alphabetic characters in cursive, and perform feats of calligraphic composition that would occasionally result in a somewhat legible paragraph or two written out in relative speed.

Fast forward to the world dominated by the evil Information Scientist and his minions, where school children are first taught the block letters and then pushed into learning the keyboard layout, skipping cursive writing altogether. So what, you may ask, what does it matter if our upcoming generations never learn to sign their names like John Hancock? The problem lies in our archives, my friends. Think of all the nineteenth and early twentieth century documents that reside in your collections. That handwriting they bear will be as unintelligible as the proverbial chicken scratchings to people who never learned how to write cursive themselves. All the scanning in the world forced by the Information Scientists won’t change this situation. It will simply result in millions of digital images that few, if any, will be able to decipher.

All is not dark, however, and even I can see one advantage in this brave new world where people sign their names with an "x". Here at True Archives we take all our uncensored notes in cursive while seated in faculty meetings or lectures, secure in the knowledge that our scribbling will remain a mystery to our younger colleagues.