Awash in Information, Historians Fear Loss of Rich Material

When Hillary Rodham Clinton disclosed that she had destroyed more than 30,000 emails about personal matters during her tenure as secretary of state, it was painful for historians and biographers. Some imagined themselves or their successors in 20 or 50 years prowling the archives with little success for the most intimate, revealing raw material.

The problem goes far beyond Mrs. Clinton, though her private life as first lady and secretary of state — and, of course, if she were to become the 45th president — is likely to be of great interest to future generations. The advance of technology has created a huge volume of digital information, much of it ephemeral and easy to lose or destroy, while all but eliminating some of the richest sources for historians who have plumbed the 19th and 20th centuries.

The lost Clinton emails, said Doris Kearns Goodwin, might have helped fill in a vivid future portrait. “A government official is not just an official,” said Ms. Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and other figures. “They have marriages and children and rich private lives that are all mixed up with their public lives. As a biographer, that’s what you want.”