Digital and Traditional Archives Management

Archives are the infrastructure of memory: they determine which records survive, whose stories get told, and how institutions and communities understand their own pasts. Archival science examines how those records are created, organized, maintained, and made accessible — a task that has grown considerably more complex as institutions grapple with the long-term stability of electronic records and the question of whether digital formats can reliably carry information across decades and centuries. At the same time, scholars and practitioners are rethinking whose authority shapes archival collections, pushing back against colonial legacies embedded in national and institutional holdings and exploring how community-led archives can recover and preserve knowledge that dominant repositories have historically ignored. Active debates center on how memory institutions should balance technological standardization with cultural specificity, and what it means to practice archival work as a form of accountability rather than neutral stewardship.

Works

149,024

Total citations

144,928

Keywords

ArchivesDigital PreservationRecords ManagementInformation CultureCommunity ArchivesPostcolonial Archive