We are prisoners of the past only when we do not remember that past.Īs custodians of that past, we bear the responsibility of collecting, preserving, organizing, making accessible, and (at some level) interpreting the historical materials in our care.

Research protocols of the present and future are haunted by long-forgotten ghosts of policy and procedure, as any reader of Siddhartha Muhkerjee will know. It is not a matter of finding some long-forgotten cure in a stereotypical dusty old tome or harming a patient because a journal article that should have been read was neglected because it was “too old” to pop up on a literature search. History matters to us: we measure our progress from where we started as well as to where we hope to go. There are few fields whose development is so deeply tied to its past as the health sciences. Our responsibilities lie far deeper than that. There is something almost plaintive about a product that calls itself “up-to-date,” and what is as out-of-date as yesterday’s Facebook post? Everything will be history someday, and if anything, the pace has quickened. Our collections, be they analog or digital, stored on shelves or in the Cloud, are the amalgamated memory of our field. While their exposition of history was delightfully idiosyncratic, their understanding of memory was spot on.Īs information professionals, whatever our exact job title, memory is at the heart of what we do. However, both were Oxford graduates, and Sellar was a schoolmaster for some years. Yeatman, authors of 1066 and All That, ever worked as librarians. When does today become “History,” with a capital H? It is a dilemma that all of us-librarians, archivists, informationists, whatever-have all faced: what do we need to remember, and for how long. C.Many years ago, two British humorists wrote (facetiously, but not altogether inaccurately) that “History is not what you thought. BibliographyĪll of the following books were co-authored with W. When asked to convert his BA from Oxford into an MA, Yeatman could not find the fee owing to debt, and hence he is recorded in 1066 and All That as 'Failed M.A., etc. He went into advertising and became advertising manager for Kodak Ltd. Yeatman had won the Military Cross in World War I before going to Oriel College, Oxford, where he met Sellar. He was born in Oporto, the principal city and port of northern Portugal, where his father was a wine merchant, a family business connected with Taylor's Port. He is best known for the book 1066 and All That, a tongue-in-cheek guide to 'all the history you can remember', which he wrote with W. Robert Julian Yeatman (15 July 1897 – 13 July 1968) was a British humorist who wrote for Punch.

Sellar and yeatman