The ancient Egyptians could scratch lines on a papyrus scroll, roll it up and put it in a jar in a dry cave — and 2,500 years later, the document would still be legible (assuming its discoverer could read ancient Egyptian).

Modern technology is more impressive, but also more fragile. Celluloid film decays, magnetic tape deteriorates, and all our digital information is stored in computer languages that will be a whole lot deader than ancient Egyptian in a tenth the time.

Recognizing the problem, archivists worldwide are inventing new ways to preserve and protect old audio-visual documents.

The U.S. Library of Congress has an “American Memory” archive that preserves, among other treasures, the early movies and recordings of the Edison Studios. (You can, for example, watch Annie Oakley sharp-shooting at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/ edac.html.)

The Imperial War Museum in the United Kingdom likewise makes available a fabulous collection of photos, sound recordings and films, both online and at the museum itself.

Canada, too, has begun to take seriously the job of preserving its fragile audio-visual artifacts. In 1996, the National Archives of Canada and the Department of Canadian Heritage began a program to identify and protect important AV works. Their first choices, announced in February 2000, give some idea of the range of works that are in danger: the original master recording of Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, the first episode of La Famille Plouffe, broadcast back in 1953, and Goin’ Down the Road, the movie that more or less launched the idea of Canadian cinema.

The Masterworks program, as the preservation venture is called, announced yesterday that it had selected the As It Happens interviews of my mother, Barbara Frum, as one of its preservation choices for 2005.

This choice represents a major commitment of resources by the National Archives. It is a great honour for all who worked on As It Happens in those years — and built the program into an institution that continues to speak to Canadians more than 35 years after the first broadcast. As my family absorbs the honour, I find myself grappling — and not for the first time — with the question: What was it exactly that made Barbara Frum such a captivating presence on the airwaves?

Just a week ago, I had a long conversation with a distinguished American who held high office in the Reagan administration. “I disagreed with your mother about just about everything,” he said, “but I always said yes to interviews with her because I so loved her voice.”

When my mother began her career in radio, interviews were recorded on reel-to-reel tapes, about five inches across. In those days, the CBC was headquartered on Toronto’s Jarvis Street, in an impossibly ramshackle and dingy building that had once been the Havergal girls’ school. Editing was done by hand-rewinding tapes and recording the desired bits onto a master. In a pinch, the editor might use a razor blade and adhesive tape.

Cumbersome as these methods were, they offered huge advantages over the still more cumbersome technologies of 1970s television. In 1971, a TV camera was a huge box weighing a couple of hundred pounds and costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. There did exist smaller, lighter cameras that could film in the field — but that left the problem of how to get the film home. The Vietnam War is remembered as the first “living room” war, but the footage shown in those living rooms was usually at least two days old. It was recorded on the Indochinese battlefield, driven to an airport, flown back to the United States, developed — and then edited into a nightly news broadcast or special report. Radio, by contrast, could immediately go anywhere a telephone could be found.

That was the insight that led to the creation of the As It Happens program. What made the creation succeed was my mother’s gift and voice.

In her 1995 biography of my mother, my sister Linda Frum tells the story of how my mother once asked, “Linda, would you like to know the secret of interviewing?”

Sure, Linda answered.

“Ask short questions.”

A short question is a question designed to obtain an answer — and not to show off the brilliance of the questioner. In my own work, I often find myself sitting in the other chair: the chair of the interviewee. As the guest, you are theoretically the object of interest — but you quickly learn that it is the host who is the star. The guest plays the same role in the interview as a frog does in a classroom lecture on dissection: No frog, no lecture. Yet in the end, the frog’s role is essentially secondary.

What made my mother so dazzlingly effective on both radio and television was her repudiation of this starring role. Her carefully researched, precisely aimed, tautly edited questions always kept the spotlight fixed upon the amphibian she was about to slice.

What was the quality that enabled her to do her work so well? Intelligence, precision of mind and hard work all contributed. But ultimately, her achievement was one of character: of empathy and of humility. It is those qualities that will now be preserved for ears as yet unborn thanks to the National Archives of Canada and Masterworks.