The Pararchive Project

Read about an archivist’s interesting experience of conducting research in another archive, something they compare to “being a guest in someone’s home in a different country and culture”.

About the Conference How does copyright impact the access to, and use of, our shared cultural heritage across borders, and online? Copyright and Cultural Memory is a free one-day conference, organised by CREATe, designed to explore this essential question. It will take place on the 9th June 2016 at The Lighthouse, Glasgow. Specifically, the conference…

York: Gateway to History – a two-year Heritage Lottery Funded project we collaborated with last year – has now officially ended. You can read all about the project highlights in the final blog post of the project’s Community Collections & Outreach Archivist – Sarah Tester here.  One of the main legacies of the project is…

“How do people assign meaning and weight to past events? Sociologists have coined the term “collective memory” to describe it. And it turns out that collective memory doesn’t just dictate the way groups recall the past en masse. Rather, wrote Jeannette A. Bastian, an event’s “memory trajectory” also influences the ways archivists preserve history—and opens…

In this piece by Gina Fairley, not only is the link between archives and culture made explicit, but the role of digitisation in facilitating broader access to and wider engagement with shared heritage is highlighted. The following comments from a contributor to the piece appear to capture this well: “Archives are unsettling, and have within…

“The Internet Archive turns 20 years old next year, having archived nearly two decades and 23 petabytes of the evolution of the World Wide Web. Yet, surprisingly little is known about what exactly is in the Archive’s vaunted Wayback Machine. Beyond saying it has archived more than 445 billion webpages, the Archive has never published…

“…data can be and should be terrain for exploration, forum for interrogation, and substrate for creation. There is prose and poetry and performance to be made from these rows and columns.” More at… medium.com/digital-moma/thousands-of-exhausted-things-or-why-we-dedicated-moma-s-collection-data-to-the-public-domain-7e0a7165e99

Statens Museum for Kunst is Denmark’s national gallery and main museum of art. The collections span 700 years of art history, presenting works from Denmark, Europe, and the rest of the world. A large share of these collections is in the public domain. They are part of our shared cultural heritage and have been around…

Loss of control of the personal archive means a loss of societal control of the cultural record. … The job of an archivist is work outside interfaces, working with the documents outside their native context, often to make sense of a previous generation’s cast-off data for the interest of the current and future ones. thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-collection-and-the-cloud

“Would you ever consider loaning out items in your collection? If so, think about whom you might make a loan to and how you’d want to handle any such transactions.” More at… unclutterer.com/2015/02/19/personal-collectors-can-learn-museums