New open access book: ‘Archives’

Posted by mdever on August 24, 2019 in archives, digital, digital preservation, digitisation, digitization, network, preservation, Publication, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

A free PDF of the new book, Archives, containing a series of essays by Andrew Lison, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, and Rick Prelinger, can be downloaded from Meson Press or purchased from The University of Minnesota Press.

From the Meson Press page:

“Archives have become a nexus in the wake of the digital turn. This book sets out to show how expanded archival practices can challenge contemporary conceptions and inform the redistribution of power and resources. Calling for the necessity to reimagine the potentials of archives in practice, the three contributions ask: Can archives fulfill their paradoxical potential as utopian sites in which the analog and the digital, the past and future, and remembrance and forgetting commingle?”

In the Introduction, ‘Contesting “The Archive,” Archives, and Thanatarchy’, Andrew Lison writes:

“The authors in this volume make a similar contribution to our understanding of archives in an age in which near-instant access to information can encourage us to take these repositories of informational, mediatic, and physical artifacts for granted. Situated at the intersection of the material and immaterial, the institutional and the independent, and, most importantly, the theoretical and the practical, the essays collected here challenge our conception of archives as either transparent conduits for storage and retrieval or sites of hierarchical, top-down dissemination. In short, they contest both the philosophy of ‘the archive’ and the implementation of really-existing archives as they have been heretofore conceived”.