Sometimes, when I'm drunk in the early morning hours, I'll find myself falling down a rabbit hole of accidentally important live albums - documents of moments in time that are impossible to replicate. I've Never Seen a Straight Banana, for instance, captures a private performance Tiny Tim gave for three teenaged fans in his motel room after a show. The Last Concert: December 4th, 1988, fittingly, features Roy Orbison's final performance, recorded two days before his death, and showcasing his still-pristine vocals.

There's something utterly fascinating about the process of documenting and archiving. It's not just about what you manage to preserve, but about what you know is lost to the sands of time. Another Tiny Tim concert album, for example, features the man performing a headlining set at the Royal Albert Hall. While this was fortuitously recorded, the supporting performances (the Bonzo Dog Band, Joe Cocker, and Peter Sarstedt) were not. We're grateful for what we've saved, but mourn what was lost.

The Washington State Historical Society (WSHS) is doing its part to preserve the memories of all manner of things related to this state, but are particularly doing the Lord's work with their efforts to find and archive old rock concert posters. "Ephemera," they're called - pieces of art that were never meant to last, just to be stapled onto a random telephone pole. Luckily, humans have an obsessive need to document their existence, so forward-thinking music fans have horded these snapshots of time.

Recently, I was hipped to this project of archiving Pacific Northwest rock ephemera by Mark Ostler, frontman of safety-punk band Warning Danger. As an entrenched member of the Seattle music scene, he's been pushing to get his friends to donate their posters to the cause. I caught up with the WSHS's Head of Special Collections Archives, Ed Nolan, to talk about this process and why it's so important.

"I've been working on this for quite a long time," says Nolan. "I came here in 1990. We're adjacent to Stadium High School, and one of the things I started observing on the telephone poles around here were all of these various music occasions - whether they were dances or raves or whatever - being posted there. And a lot of them. So, I started appropriating them, at least one copy each, for our collection. We have a fair number of them. Not much from the Seattle area; mostly the Tacoma scene, and from a limited period because, for some reason, they've stopped posting them on telephone poles."

As technology begins to overtake every aspect of our lives, physical show flyers have naturally begun to dwindle. It's easier to send out an event invitation on Facebook than it is to head to Kinko's and get 50 posters printed out for the explicit purpose of catching an eye before disintegrating in the rain. Still, intrepid DIY bands and fans continue to take the time to design and post these ephemera, even if the art form isn't as prevalent as it used to be.

"We're very interested in the whole music scene, from the earliest days to the present, and we try to save everything we can," says Nolan. "Our primary thing at the WSHS is to preserve them so that they can be used in the future - for instance, different organizations have called on us to use the Jimi Hendrix things that we have, for actually fairly major exhibits. We never know what to save, but these things need to be documented. That's the important thing. ... We have some color Nirvana, In Utero and some of those things, and even further back, we have the Wailers. That's going back to the '60s."

If you'd like to contribute to the WSHS's growing tapestry of rock documentation, they are more than willing to take your posters and flyers off your hands. Be aware, though, that only originals will be accepted: no copies. Immortality is unachievable in life, but carrying on the story of a life or a city or a time in music is as easy as picking up that rain-soaked ephemera.

Ed Nolan can be reached at 253.7985917.

The Washington State Historical Society is at 1911 Pacific Ave. in downtown Tacoma.