Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

Please Stop Calling Things Archives

Perspectives on History: “Various disciplinary “archival turns” over the course of the past few decades have resulted in a tendency towards the over-casual use of the word “archive” as a shorthand to refer to, well, just about anything. While historians are not the most egregious of offenders, this exasperating tendency has led to an increasing sense of frustration and alienation on the part of librarians, archivists, curators, and other cultural heritage workers, who are loath to see their professional terminology co-opted in imprecise ways…

A flash drive is not an archive, a website is not an archive, and the internet is not an archive…”

Sorry, comments are closed for this post.