“Almost any collection of documents is an Archive”

Almost any collection of documents can be considered an archive. For my element, I have made a collage on Adobe Photoshop. This includes various collections of media, which I consider to be collections of archive. These collections include screen shots of my personal Spotify playlists, written documents in folders saved on my desktop, stock photos of CDs, cabinets and various other mediums.

According to French philosopher, Michel Foucault, the archive has previously been thought to be made up of written documents (Robertson 2011). Because of the ever-changing media landscape, this definition of tangible, written documents has limitations and therefore must be re-assessed. To do so, one must let go of preconceived ideas of what an archive and document is. John Durham Peters from the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa states that we are living in the most “archive friendly moment in history” (2011). Documents have transformed from a white A4 piece of paper, to an MP3 file in iTunes, a PDF in a folder on ‘Finder’ and a CD-ROM.

Although almost any collection of documents can be considered an archive, it is important to acknowledge limitations of the Archive as well as limitations through the mediums in which they exist. To do this, and for this exploration, we will examine both psychical and digital archives as well as limitations of the overall concept of the Archive. All archives are incomplete (Douglas 2010) as they have their own biases based on inclusion, omissions and point of view.

Powerful online search tools or digital Archives such as Google Scholar, YouTube, and Spotify have revolutionised the way in which we engage with the published literature and are “invaluable tools for anyone engaging in research” (Nature Reviews Microbiology, 2010, page). However, these tools are only as useful as the contents of the databases around which they are built, and unfortunately much of the older literature is absent. Although these digital Archives are continuously adding to their collection, there is much missing. For example, even though there is a comprehensive amount of pre-digitally produced music available on Spotify to explore, there are so many other recordings that haven’t been transferred and could readily be available at a record shop.

Digitisation of existing physical Archives is a major priority around the world. The British Library has partnered with online publisher Brightsolid to digitise up to 40 million pages of newspapers, and in the USA, The Smithsonian Institute has digitising its entire collection. This includes137 million objects, 100,000 cubic feet of archival material and 1.8 million library volumes (Hughes 2012). The sense of limitability is almost absent online with an abundance of Archival material readily available. However, new media also teaches us to cherish what we didn’t know we had with old media (Durham 2011). For example, consider a video from the 1950s that has been digitised onto an online Archive. When watching this video online, compared to going to perhaps a Library with an old reel-to-reel projector, everything from the aesthetic to the experience of watching the film is drastically different.

REFERENCES

Arbitarily, O 2013, ‘File: CD rack.JPG’, digital photograph, Wikimedia Commons, accessed 25 March 2017, < https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CD_rack.JPG>.

Douglas, S 2010, ‘Writing From the Archive: Creating Your Own’, The Communication Review vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 5-14.

Evanson, T 2012, ‘Daniel Ellsberg psychiatrist filing cabinet’, digital photograph, Flickr, accessed 25 March 2017, <https://www.flickr.com/photos/timevanson/7237653296>.

Gorzen, A 2007, ‘Shelves-of-file-folders.jpg’, digital photograph, Wikimedia Commons, accessed 26 March 2017, <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shelves-of-file-folders.jpg>.

Hodan, G 2017, ‘Shining Blue Water Background’, digital photograph, Public Domain Pictures, accessed 26 March 2017, <http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=42852&picture=shining-blue-water-background>.

Hughes, L 2012. Evaluating and Measuring the Value, Use and Impact of Digital Collections, London: Facet Publishing.

Nature Reviews Micobiology 2010, Raiders of the lost articles: Limitations in online journal archives and citation search tools, coupled with inaccessibility of older journals in libraries, threaten to disconnect us from our microbiological history, Nature Reviews Microbiology, viewed 25 March 2017, <http://www.nature.com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/nrmicro/journal/v8/n9/full/nrmicro2435.html >.

Peters, J 2011, ‘Why we use pencils and other thoughts on the Archive’, Media History and the Archive, Robertson, Craig, Taylor & Francis, Abingdon, pp. 108-120.

Rajesh, M 2017, ‘Glitter Pattern 1’, digital photograph, Public Domain Pictures, accessed 26 March 2017, < http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=170375&picture=glitter-pattern-1>.

Robertson, C 2011, Media History and the Archive, Taylor and Francis.

‘Stock photo of blur, bookcase’ 2017, digital photograph, Pexels, accessed 25 March 2017, <https://www.pexels.com/photo/blur-bookcase-business-cds-264544/>.

Yang, M 2017, ‘False Green Grass Wallpaper’, digital photograph, Public Domain Pictures, accessed 26 March 2017, < http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=49762&picture=false-green-grass-wallpaper>.