Storage, storage storage. It seems we are always running out of space and in the midst of material chaos. Reading through Lischer-Katz article it felt like I have read all of this before. Actually my perception is that all I have read about archives lately talks about the same points. Firstly, the question of the immateriality of digital material. Second, the ecological impact of not only maintaining the new infrastructures to store and preserve digital media, but also the impact of our analog media material that needs to be discarded. And Finally, the worry that a significant amount of our analog collections and in the future even our digital collections will be lost.
A fascinating aspect of this moment in archival history is that I can’t stop but think about how the archives have always been overlooked and seen as transparent, even before the digitization era. Before digitization maybe because it was too big and in your face and now because through digitization everything gets sent away to the “Cloud”. With this transparency that follows archives a worry surfaces. What is the future of archives and how will archivists, scholars and the public’s relationships to it change? Will we loose the archives as we know it?
On the other hand, the ecological aspects are clearly not addressed as often making it more difficult to come to a well rounded solution for this reality. We talk about the problems that we know so well, but what are we going to do about it? It’s like we are in a constant loop of recycled conversation.
Thanks! Yes, we have heard this before. I suggested we read this super-short piece at mid-semester because it recaps much of what we’ve already discussed, using a lot of our familiar metaphors!