⤡ 05.01
The invention of printing created the possibility of storing all the cultural information one does not wish to be burdened with ‘in the fridge’ — that is too say, in books — whilst knowing that the information could be found whenever it was needed. Aspects of memory can be delegated to books, and to machines, but we still have to know how to use these tools to their maximum effect.
⤡ 05.03
With so much abundance of information online, the most precious skill for a reader is his personal filter.
Mining the sea of information on the net, with its unstable characteristics, makes people conscious that paper
is
a stable memory extension, platform-independent and physically limited. After the gigantic effort of digitizing
books and magazines using microfilm technology (during the past decades), now there are countless efforts to preserve
old printed materials, making them available again. Scanners, OCR software, the Pdf and Html standard do the trick to bring new
life to the dead, out of print or missing books and magazines. This rebirth of forgotten
or hard to find material is contributing
to specific theoretical and historical debate.
⤡ 05.02
Culture is essentially a graveyard for books and other lost objects. Scholars are currently researching how culture is a process of tacitly abandoning certain relics of the past (thus filtering), while placing others in a kind of refrigerator, for the future. Archives and libraries are cold rooms in which we store what has come before, so that the cultural space is not cluttered, without having to relinquish those memories entirely.
⤡ 05.04
But when a book featured in Google Books is still protected by copyright, the impression (made by the cover and the
bibliographic data) of accessing an ‘archive’ soon turns out to be quite illusory: as soon as the user attempts
to read further within any particular book, most of the content turns out to
be unavailable
(“not shown
in this
preview”).
⤡ 05.05
Conceptually, an archive can be considered as a substantial quantity of raw material (data) to which further transformations may be applied. Art, and more specifically media art, often deals with archives and their intriguing content (data which is connected yet heterogeneous) – still, the attitude of artists, when referring to paper archives, seems to be to approach them from a retrospective point of view. An artist referring to an archive will usually depict its traditional, physical form, which is undoubtedly still the one we’re most familiar with, even after a few decades of computers and databases.
⤡ 05.06
Anyone who hasn't been able
to keep up to date with their data storage since the first computers in 1983, moving from
floppy disks to mini disks to compact discs to memory sticks, will have lost some or all of their archive several times over.
⤡ 05.07
And using print-on-demand technology, one could (again) produce real, physical scrapbooks, which would also be more or
less instantly shareable. Such personal archives, the result of the individual sampling of content, could be connected to form
a global archive of digital sources, collectively filtered
by human passions and interests – a sort of cut-and-paste
‘mashup’ bootleg remixes.
⤡ 05.08
The resulting repositories and databases, covering a wide variety of topics, could be made collectively searchable using
simple (and free) software, which periodically surveys and indexes the content of each archive and makes it easily accessible
through a dedicated search engine. The result: independent ‘islands’ of archived culture, gradually emerging and
growing all across the Internet – all created by individuals sharing a passion, wishing to share information,
and contributing to making accessible important content, currently unavailable on the Web. In other words,
a collective
memory, in much the same way as peer-to-peer networks have proven to be: combining the stability of our ‘static’
printed culture with the ephemeral (and thus dynamic) properties of digitisation.
⤡ 05.09
Wikipedia is now clearly the largest single global effort for sharing knowledge
– but from a general, non-specialist,
perspective, leaving plenty of gaps to be filled by countless specialised, independent (but networked) online archives
of
previously printed content. Meanwhile, access to such archives is increasingly becoming the norm among scholars, who need to
efficiently and comprehensively search through huge quantities of information. Libraries increasingly prefer online magazine
subscriptions to printed ones – simply because they’re running out of space to store all the back issues.
And the new online servic- es that sell digital subscriptions to printed publications, often demand from publishers at
least a minimum online back catalogue archive,
in order to establish the publisher’s online presence
(as well as their own).