Archives: The War on Entropy

Hoe denken anderen over ons, archivarissen, en ons vak:

Bijschrift toevoegen

Eerder schreef ik al over de Dark Archives van Maly. In zijn stuk in Contents Magazine zegt hij eveneens iets over de rol van een archief:

Archives as commonly understood are bastions in the war on entropy. From within the archives, a holding action is fought against the ravages of time. The mission is to preserve the few scraps of knowledge, art, and memory you have clawed out of a barely intelligible universe, and to pass them down to future generations. 

The basic activities of an archive are collection, storage, preservation, search, and retrieval. Together, these form interrelated but non-identical streams. When the rate of some streams outpace the others, things start to go strange: when the rate of collection and storage outpaces search and retrieval, we begin to lose access to an archive’s contents, and the archive begins to go dark.

En verderop:

I said earlier that archives are at the front lines of the fight against entropy. To be precise, the entropy of decay that robs us of the scraps of knowledge we have managed to collect. [...]  we have come to understand that there is a second kind of entropy at play: the entropy of an archive grown too quickly, which outstrips its maintainers’ abilities to retrieve the information being stored.

Ik had het zelf kunnen zeggen. Maar dan vanuit een ander uitgangspunt ;-)

Meer meningen van anderen over ons.

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