Ispectrum Magazine Ispectrum Magazine #08 | Page 40

research, photographs, art and music are part of what is regarded as important. The message of the value of these works seems to be getting out to the general public. In popular culture today we witness examples from the recent past that may prove instructive to us about our future. In the 2014 movie Monuments Men, the character Frank Stokes states, “You can wipe out an entire generation, you can burn their homes to the ground and somehow they’ll still find their way back. But if you destroy their history, you destroy their achievements and it’s as if they never existed.” This dialog echoes the future value in digital-born media. As valuable as digitalborn media can be, we need to remember it is also inherently fragile with a short shelf life. This became evident when my editor and I began research on George Lambert, a two time Olympic medalist and WWII veteran. Born in a small, Iowa town in the United States he passed away in Wisconsin, US in 39 2012. Few people with whom we discussed Lambert knew of his accomplishments. In fact, the Preservation Society for his home county had no records of his achievements. We conducted our original research by looking at his online obituary. On the first visit to the obit, everything seemed fine and neither of us had thought