If you wanted to research who participated in the Torch Relay during Salt Lake's 2002 Winter Olympics, you could look into it. That's because determined people made sure everything broadcast, printed or performed at the time was archived and cataloged.
"I remember that stuff pretty vividly. It was very challenging," said Dr. Greg Thompson, emeritus associate dean for the J. Willard Marriott Library, where the Games are archived. "It took a lot of hard work and constant moving to get to the people that count—and then convince my own university and my own library that they should help fund all this."
To ensure every bit of information was gathered and archived, Thompson and former Tribune writer Mike Korologos went to Atlanta to see how information and memorabilia from the 1996 Summer Olympics was saved.
"There were 10,000 cartons lined up in a row at the Georgia State Archives looking for a home. They had been processed, and they seemed organized, and there they sat," Thompson said. "Nobody wanted them. Nobody had the capacity to take that kind of size on. I'm used to large carton collections and this was beyond that."
Korologos, communications director for the 2002 Bid and Organizing Committees, calls himself a "history nut." He went home and started filling cartons. In the end, he says he saved 10 boxes of "records, files, pictures, videos, brochures, manuscripts, reports, contracts—any bazillion number of things" that came across his desk.
"The committee—as I remember—they were busy putting on the Games," Korologos says. "They were doing housing, traffic, meeting VIPs, trying to raise money, going to the state and federal governments ... Let's say that the records were a way-down-years-away-who-cares type of thing."
Thompson remembers another facet of the problem: the bribery scandal that beset the games, dissolved the first Organizing Committee and led to a second. Some people carried over, but much of the work to support archivists had to be redone. It took 10 years to develop the archival process and put it in place. After the Games, a call was made to the university community, the media and members of the public to donate mementos and images, which today are available for public use. This was a boon to the collection, because the TV broadcast is the property of the International Olympic Committee, which strictly controls its public use.
"Peoples' interest in helping us try to document the whole experience was pretty strong," said Thompson.
When considering the upcoming 2034 Games, Thompson says the challenge lies in the way documentation has changed. "Most of it will be visual, not just audio, so you're burning up scads of storage space," he said. "And I'm certain at this point nobody's even begun to give a thought to that topic."
"I hope they can expand some way to house all that [for the next Games]," added Korologos, "but it all comes down to funding."