archiving is the new black
meaning that it is fashionable, as john suggests, and across a range of groupings from artists, theorists to preservation/conservation professionals, because it throws up a lot of interesting ideas about what the archive is or can be
there are questions around the practices of reformatting archive material digitally and the increased (demand for) access..., and problems have arisen in establishing archival standards and also around reformatting from older to newer technology as a part of collections management
but wider than this are the theoretical discussions around what an archive is. john highlights the teleology within the classical notion of an archive when he prefers civilization to barbarism, and there has been the idea that since Gutenburg (re)invented movable type we've been kind of formatted into browsing and keyword searching (mass literacy became possible; pagination, indexing and referencing all introduced a way of hyperlinking the reader to the text corpus of the library) and the archive has become permanent and growing (though with a high level of inbuilt redundancy and loss)
but now we live in an information society that doesn't just use digital archiving, rather we live in a society that is a digital archive
so for me there is the significance of the use of what might have remained as raw information; the new teleological ramifications of archiving; aswell as the an understanding of what databases are, and from with what kind of enframing.....
ciao jonni
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