Fossilized Court Records

I woke up an hour early than I usually do today. I would’ve wanted to take an early bath and head to the office as early as 7:00 a.m., but the freezing temperature has effectively nailed me to my bed.

Who needs a refrigerator with this temperature. I think the hot dogs in my freezer would still easily surpass its expiry date even if I just store them inside my closet.

I hope that preserving very old court records is as easy as keeping food from being spoiled. There was a time when I wanted to check two case files that date back to the late 1800s, but the custodian refused to allow me to touch them. He said that the pages and the cover were already very brittle, and that exposing it to moisture might further aggravate its discoloration.

There’s a wealth of legal, literary, and historical information in court records, especially the old ones. Their custodians should exert an effort to make them available to the public. If they’re afraid that may not maintain the records in their original state if they are constantly being accessed, then what they should do is reproduce them in microfilm so that they could easily be read.