The Pararchive Project

The nation’s sound collections are under threat, both from physical degradation and as the means of playing them disappear from production.  “The Library’s own collections are made up of over 40 formats, from wax cylinders, to cassette players, to reel-to-reel and digital minidiscs. The equipment to play them is no longer being produced, and will…

Though Pararchive’s origins lie in the exploration of archives and heritage, we realised at a very earlier stage that the route through this was storytelling. We always knew that personal narratives and biographies would help to locating our users in what might be otherwise overwhelmingly voluminous collections and historical contexts. I think most of us understand that writing…

“He said this was archaeology: ‘You’re digging up websites and restoring them to their former glory. You’re recontextualising them and they’re telling us about dotcom culture. What I’m trying to do…is bring back the website together with the technology that it was built in and for. It’s not just about the website itself, but about…

Defunct software artefacts ignored by their creators – with availability, support and copyright often left ignored – has given rise to a culture of Abandonware. Amateur enthusiasts, unofficially and usually with fuzzy legal positions, make older software available through emulation or download. Just a few days ago, the Internet Archive launched a public collection of almost 2400 MS-DOS…

“The public will now be able to search the database of wills from their home, rather than needing to visit the probate registry to search the archives in person. … Every will among the 41 million is a precious historical document that can provide remarkable insight into generations of lives lived and lost.” More at… New…

This is slight diversion from our usual beat of stories on archives and storytelling, but interesting to our project nonetheless. Games studio Versu have created Prompter, a programming language for narrative. When, say, Aaron Sorkin or J. J. Abrams are writing a screenplay, they’re not typing little essays to specify that REPUBLICAN FLACK #2 or SCIENCE OFFICER…

A travel app that puts storytelling and cultural immersion above all else. More at humanity.tv/about.html…

As Barack Hussein Obama reaches the end of his term as POTUS, plans for his presidential library are beginning to emerge. With most presidential materials from the current being born digital, the Obama Presidential Library could be radically different from its predecessors… …it’s likely that Obama won’t have the voluminous amounts of papers, letters, and other correspondence…

“In the video below, we pay homage to the visual style of five present-day legends using only footage and music found in the Shutterstock library…” We’ve been excited to see what our partners at Bokeh Yeah! might come up with when let loose inside the archives at the BBC and other collections. The video above…

“…many museums have a secret room (or two or ten) well out of the public eye. Here are a few of those, full of books, boobs, and beetles.” I wonder, will our Science Museum and National Media Museum partners have some secret rooms for us to integrate into the Pararchive app? 😉 More at Atlas Obscura…