Free For All Friday No 791 by Laurie

Happy New Year! I have the privilege of writing the first FFAF of 2024. I hope it's a great year for you all!

If you are considering throwing out your old diary pages, instead you might consider donating them to one of the many institutions dedicated to preserving diaries for their historic and informational value. I first found out about these in the book The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (which I discussed a bit in my previous FFAF). 

The Great Diary Project in London (thegreatdiaryproject.co.uk) accepts donations of diaries in pretty much any form: looseleaf pages, bound volumes, etc. They are flexible in what they call a diary and happily accept pages used for future planning, recording information, personal journaling, daily logs, travel journals, etc. They currently have more than 8,000 diaries, all carefully archived and catalogued. 

According to the aforementioned book, there are also similar diary archives in France (Association pour l'autobiographie, http://autobiographie.sitapa.org/), Germany (Tagebucharchiv, https://tagebucharchiv.de/the-german-archives-for-diaries/) and the Netherlands (Dagboekarchief, https://www.dagboekarchief.nl/). 

I love that so many people recognise personal diaries for the enormous historic value they contain, and want to preserve them and make them available to the public. It may be hard to imagine our personal diaries/ planners as having anything that people in the future might find important, but years from now our pages might contain glimpses into a way of life that newer generations may find interesting and useful.

I keep and archive all of my diary pages, but if you don't, would you ever consider sending yours to a diary archive such as these? 

And as always on Fridays, feel free to ask and/ or discuss anything ring binder organiser related!

Happy New Year everyone!