Digital archives don’t offer the same tangibility as physical archives
In my collage, I wanted to explore the concept of physical archives offering a tangible quality that can’t be experienced when accessing a digital archive.
I choose to represent this tangibility by finding a picture from a heavily archived event, the moon landing, from an online archive (archive.org). Then I printed the picture and glued bits of scrunched up tissue paper and pieces of foil to like stars, adding texture to the photograph. By scanning the collage before uploading it, the image became grainier, giving it a more textured look than if I had edited the photo on my laptop.
I also wanted the collage to demonstrate how digital technology has allowed us to only access documents more easily than ever before, but that we can also modify copies of these documents, which may give us a new perspective on these artefacts. It would not possible for me to create an image such as this one without digital archives or modern photocopiers and scanners, as if only the original photograph existed, there would be no way of gaining permission to modify it.
Some academics have expressed concerns about what developments in technology will mean for physical archives. Richard J Cox has suggested in his article Appraisal and the Future of Archives in Digital Era, that “Researches relying on online sources may cease visiting physical spaces or even the use of traditional documentary materials housed in a physical repositories.” This concern seems to be relatively unfounded, as physical archives will always be needed to store the originals and physical copies of the documents that people wish to access. And so long as this archives exist, there will be academics and researchers who would prefer to use physical documents rather than electronic ones, at least for certain aspects of their work if not all.
While there are some who claim that digital archives are killing physical archives, electronic archiving has given us some undeniable advantages. Most notably, the ability to access documents quickly that may only exist in a physical format on the other side of the world. Eric Ketelaar outlines in his article, Tacit Narratives: The meaning of archives, how “the time lag between sender and receiver has been reduced to seconds, instead of the days, weeks or even months in past.” Overall, this increase in accessibility which now allows us to access millions of documents from our own homes means that we have become more productive. Research that may have taken weeks of searching for information in the past can now be reduced to a number of hours.
Pat Oddly has stated that “the post-modern library is a library where securities have been lost, but where freedom have been gained.” This statement could be adapted to apply to the digital archive. While it is unclear exactly what archives will be in the future, there will certainly to be new way in which we can access and utilise documents, which will no doubt be vital for researches and academics for generations to come.
Bibliography
Original photo source: https://mix.msfc.nasa.gov/abstracts.php?p=1859
Cox, Richard J. (2011) Appraisal and the Future of Archives in the Digital Era. In: The Future of Archives and Recordkeeping: A Reader. Facet, London, pp. 213-237
Ketelaar, E. (2001). Tacit narratives: The meanings of archives. Archival Science, 1(2), pp.131-141.
Oddy, Pat (1997) “Who dares, wins: libraries and catalogues for a postmodern world”,Library Review 16