In August 1989, three months before the wall came down, a clerk in a regional administrative office completed a routine inventory. There was no reason to think it would be the last one. The forms used were the standard forms. The categories were the categories that had been in use for fifteen years.
By the following March, the regime that had commissioned the inventory no longer existed. The clerk did not, particularly. The office was reorganized. The forms were superseded. But the inventory survived, because nobody thought to destroy it. Boring documents are the ones that tend to make it across regime change. The interesting ones get burned.
What an inventory remembers
An inventory does not editorialize. It lists. What it lists, in this case, is everything the office held in August 1989: physical assets, archived case files, supply requisitions, the names of the personnel who had access to which cabinet. By itself, none of this is dramatic. As an index to other documents that did not survive, it is invaluable. You cannot read the missing files. You can read the inventory that says they existed.
Boring documents are the ones that tend to make it across regime change.
The historian’s habit is to look for the dramatic file. The archivist’s habit is to look for the index. Most of the actual work of recovering what an institution did in a given year is done with indexes — with inventories, mailing lists, supply orders, the unsexy paperwork that survives because no one bothered to destroy it.
A working principle
Save the boring documents. The dramatic ones are usually performed for the camera; the boring ones are made because someone needed to find a stapler. They tell you, decades later, the shape of what happened, even when the contents have all been removed.