Archiving in the Age of Digital Conversion: Notes for a Politics of "Remains"

Over the last few decades, the public institutions responsible for archiving have been confronted with new challenges arising from electronic communication. Nevertheless, as a specialist in such national institutions has noted, "although some actions have been taken, digital preservation research and implementation are still in their infancy" (Steenbakkers). There have been numerous inquiries and research projects on archiving, and there is no doubt that studies on the digitalization of manuscripts, printed matter, photos, films, sound recordings and more have resulted in a number of short- or intermediate-term solutions. However, solutions often differ from country to country, and the rapidly evolving techniques for preserving and reproducing require frequent updating. Hence the problems posed still need to be pondered in their breadth and depth.

The archive is located at the intersection, on the one hand, of the materiality of the means of preservation and communication of documents, and on the other hand, of the relationships of power and of the institutions of the past. The archive is a particular case of social transmission. One could even say that it transforms a text, an image, or a sound into a document, in the same way that a rubber stamp gives a letter an official status. The archive is an authorization to endure beyond the ephemerality that characterizes human productions. In the strict sense, an archive is "an assemblage of documents, no matter what their form or their material support, whose increase is ensured automatically through the activities of a private or public person" (André, 29). However, it is judicious also to think of the archive as every trace of the past that has been documented, thus giving it an authority (at least potential) by this act of conservation or of extraction. Now, in the age of digital communication, the ways of recording our present have mutated. Thus it is essential to address the question of the contemporary archive with epistemological and historical breadth, in order to better grasp its difficulties and possibilities.

These stakes concern not only archival technology, though this is important. Recall the Stasi archives recovered ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall: they were on the hard drive of an obsolete computer, whose software was unreadable. Likewise, in March 2007, in reformatting a hard drive, a technician erased 800,000 images from Alaska's permanent collection, valued at $38 million (he also erased the backup drive, while the third backup—floppy disks—were illegible). These examples demonstrate both the economic, political, and social value of the archive, and its electronic vulnerability. Ease of storage, diffusion and accessibility do not necessarily mean that all problems are resolved. Stories of electronic catastrophes have made news headlines. Others are more mundane and forgotten, making us realize that the problem is not accidental but structural: the rapid obsolescence of computers and software necessitate constant "migrations" and upgrading, but such upgrading is often done only for the documents that are consulted the most. Meanwhile, hyperlinks are broken, the average longevity of a web page is 44 days, and you could look in vain for the very first announcement of a university that appeared in 1995. In London in November 2010 a movement was launched to demonstrate digital archaeology—"an attempt to kick-start a wider attempt to archive the web in Britain's first 'digital archive,' since, 'In five years' time or so, I doubt websites will exist and I expect the vast majority of sites from the first twenty years of the Web to be gone forever.' says Jim Boulton, curator of Digital Archaeology." ¹ If technological obsolescence forces transfers that lose some of the integrity of the original documents, while numerous other resources (texts, images, web pages, etc.) are lost through lack of upgrading, the flip side is information overload and the overwhelming mass of resources that become, paradoxically, a problem for managing the pertinent documents. As Bertrand Gervais has aptly put it, "we no longer need to wave our magic wand to find the text; rather, we need to build a dam to contain the...