Archival Liveness: The Paper Archive in the Digital Age

Posted by mdever on May 6, 2015 in digitisation, materiality, paper, Publication

New article by Joy Palacios in the new journal Performance Matters.

From the article:

“…in the midst of the laborious photo-taking and PDF creating process, I often wondered: am I killing my archive? If disaster were to strike the Maison provinciale such that future researchers could only access its contexts via the PDF versions I created, what would be lost? Would it be the same archive? Most certainly not. Alternatively, if future researchers chose not to visit the archive and to rely instead on the digital versions I created, could they really claim to have consulted the manuscript I had attempted to preserve?”

‘Archival Liveness’ has been added to our library of readings on Archives and Materiality and this issue of  Performance Matters has been added to our list of journal special issues on archival themes.