Electronic archives

Abstract

An archive is a collection of materials intended to be kept safe for the long term. Those materials are gathered by some responsible agency, but they were created originally by others. They were made in the forms and with the methods chosen by their creators. That is, an archive contains materials that have been created by others, that have been formed and informed by the judgements of others and that are intensely idiosyncratic. An archive is not simply a collection of facts or ideas or objects; it is a collection of other peoples’ individual or collected facts and ideas and objects. As a result, the contents of an archive are disparate in the extreme, from books to diaries to maps to photographs. A digital archive is at least as chaotic as any other, probably more so. Its contents may include text files, data-base files, images, CAD files, GIs files and more.

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