A father's reflection

My father passed away in 1975 at the age 40 when I was only six year old. At that young age, I could not remember much about my father or experienced his love as a father towards me. From the numerous chats I have with my mother, I portrayed my father as a compassionate, caring and loving person who always put others’ interests above his own. Besides the few photographs of my father that my mother kept, there isn’t much documents and records that I have of my father to help me seek for knowledge, meaning and understanding of who a person my father was and our interrelationships with one another. This remains the biggest regret in my life for not given the opportunities to get to know more and build up a fuller relationship with my father.

On 29 Sep 2003, I became a proud father of a lovely baby girl, Janice who is six this year. What made it so special for me was that I actually delivered my own child at home. Going through this process of becoming a father myself, I can now fully experience the everlasting love a father would give to his own child. For how much I love my daughter now, I believed my father would have loved me as much for the six short years together.

Since the day Janice was borned, I have been capturing beautiful pictures of her growing up together with us, videotaping of wonderful moments we spent with each other such as birthday parties, family holiday trips, and more recently, tapping on the Web2.0 technologies. Time flies, amazingly, I have been capturing these “works” for the last six years already and I remain convinced that these memorial documents and records (digital photographs, video recordings, DVDs, blogs) will become useful and valuable to Janice someday when there is a quest for knowledge or a search for some understanding or meaning in the later part of her life.

As part of my MSc programme, I took up a course on Archival Informatics. After attending the first class on 13 Aug 09, I begun to realize that archival is more than just acquiring (data/information in memory cards, tapes), formatting (by converting digital video from tape into DVD) and backing up documents (into portable harddisks) which I have done so far.

Looking forward, I hope that after going through this “H6692 Introduction to Archival Informatics” module, I will be able to apply the Archival Principles well to my "home" project so that Janice will be able to access my blogs, documents, video recordings, photographs, CD ROMs and DVDs, etc, for a long long time...

That's me in my dad's arm, together with my mum and younger sister, Lilian.