We no longer rely only on paper to communicate and record what we think and do. The thoughtful letters George Bishop and Donald Hebb wrote to each other in the early 1950s about the problem of pain would be e-mail messages if they were written today. Many of John Bonica's important conversations about a multidisciplinary pain society took place over the telephone, and there is no trace of them in his personal papers. Nowadays we keep careful and extensive records of our work and activities. We keep our records on paper or on disk until there is no longer any space in the file cabinet, or we upgrade our computers or move down the hall or across the world.
History vanishes slowly, page by page.
You have guessed by this point that I want to convince you to help preserve the record of the 20th-century pain field, but you don't know what to save or how or where to save it. If they appeared in established print journals, published papers are in much less danger of vanishing than are many other types of materials. Libraries preserve them, and since 1966 Medline has provided the quintessential index. Archives nonetheless like to own one full set of an author's reprints to complement his or her unpublished papers. A professional group should preserve its history by saving agendas, minutes, programs, reports, and committee correspondence.