Negotiating the Archive (Digitally)

Extracts from an essay by Sue Breakell: http://www.tate.org.uk/download/file/fid/7288

The arrival of the personal computer has helped change the status of the archive in our daily lives. With the development of the idea of ‘archiving’ electronic documents, ‘archive’ has become a verb. A modern dictionary says that the verb means:

1. To store historical records or documents in an archive.

2. In computing, to store electronic information that you no longer need to use regularly.

In addition, ‘archive’ as a noun is now used much more loosely than before, and has both a professional and a popular meaning. The conventional professional definition of the archive is:

1. A collection of historical records relating to a place, organisation or family.

2. A place where historical records are kept.

However, the popular meaning of ‘archive’ seems to embrace any group of objects – often digital – which are gathered together and actively preserved. The word can also be used to suggest somewhat imprecise notions of historicity, age or retention. The popular understanding of ‘archive’, thus, has moved beyond the areas on which much theoretical discourse about the archive concentrates, and this change needs to be reflected in our professional realms. Archives no longer belong to the lawmakers and the powerful; archivists see themselves as serving society rather than the state. The archive theorist Eric Ketalaar has described this view of the archive as, ‘By the People, of the People, for the People’ (p. 2).

Christian Boltanski has said of the problems posed by preserving items within a museum setting:

Preventing forgetfulness, stopping the disappearance of things and beings seemed to me a noble goal, but I quickly realised that this ambition was bound to fail, for as soon as we try to preserve something, we fix it. We can preserve things only by stopping life’s course. If I put my glasses in a vitrine, they will never break, but will they still be considered glasses? ... Once glasses are part of a museum’s collection, they forget their function, they are then only an image of glasses. In a vitrine, my glasses will have lost their reason for being, but they will also have lost their identity (p. 2).