What are archives?
How are they important in society?
What effects do archives have both socially and individually?
One of my favourite ways of finding something out quickly and effectively is through dictionary.com. Here I was given the definition of archive to be "any extensive record or collection of data". Pretty straight forward. A simple example of an archive which I found to be quite clever, is seen in this week's lecture. The lecturer describes a sea sponge as being an archive, in the way that it absorbs information, and releases content/expression when you squeeze it.
I soon realised, however, that archives can also be quite a complicated matter. For starters, they often hold authority in the way that they can lay the basis for rules. An instance of this is government institutional records, which hold importance in maintaining society. They are therefore important to society in the way that they create order and stability among the community. They also hold laws which can be recorded, preserved or destroyed.
Archives can exist in many different forms, for anything that holds some form of memory can be considered an archive. This includes books, websites, phones, legal documents and so on. All of these mediums can hold and distribute information or memory. It is for this reason that archives are also seen as “the basis for individual memory” (stated in this week’s lecture). To me this means that the mediums with which we as individuals store information, allows us to hold memory which we can distribute or regain at anytime. I’m not sure how precise my evaluation of this concept is, as I am still trying to understand it... but those are my thoughts for now.
Source: http://www.lindseykennedy.com/archives.asp
http://www.mclibrary.duke.edu/training/mobiledevices/apple
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