(DOWNLOAD) "Archiving As the Last Conservation (Essay)" by Modern Age * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Archiving As the Last Conservation (Essay)
- Author : Modern Age
- Release Date : January 22, 2007
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 173 KB
Description
THE ART HISTORIAN Charles Merewether, in an introduction to The Archive, informs us that "in the modern era, the archive--official or personal--has become the most significant means by which historical knowledge and memory are collected, stored and recovered." (1) It is hard to imagine a more pellucid and accurate summation. While it is common knowledge that archives preserve written and sometime recorded messages in an environment in which such documents are publicly available (such as a library), it is less well appreciated that archives are a mechanism to conserve materials. As a consequence, the archival process both preserves memories and identifies those elements of the past and present that merit consideration in the future. An archive is hence a collective file with a sly sense of prediction built into it: namely, a statement of lasting worth, or what Russell Kirk liked to call an "appreciation of the permanent things." Such preliminary observations raise several questions that are more prosaic and confined to our age. To start with, what happens to archives in a world of electronic mail that is abbreviated or erased? And beyond historical memory is there anything else that archives can teach us? I hope to explain the role of inherited and stored intelligence in a world of information technology, which has a focus on immediacy that seems terribly indifferent to questions of memory and morality alike. Yet, the deeper the probe, the more evident does it become that the archive as a cultural product and the archivist as a moral predictor of what is worth preserving continually surface.