Archives, Digital Archives, And Web Archives
An archive, as defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “a place in which public records or historical documents are preserved”. Archival materials, which comprise archives, are “information objects that serve as evidence of past events” (van Garderen, 2007), (Archive Discovery: A How-To Guide).
Archives and archiving activities have become objects of philosophical reflection themselves. For instance, French philosopher and literary critic Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984) explored the question in his 1969 work The Archaeology of Knowledge. The 1995 book by French continental philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930 – 2004), Archive Fever, discusses electronic media and the relatively new concept of e-mail, and uses Freudian theory, including the Freudian notion of the “death drive”, to treat archives (Owens).
One may also think of an archive as a physical space where records are organized and stored. Libraries, hospitals, and financial institutions need to retain these records (e.g. tax records), and, at least to some degree, they are stored “in” an archive, or “in the archives”. Hence, archives are records management mechanisms. An archive can also refer to a collection of related material, such as the “papers” of a particular person or records of some organization. Archives often refer to physical storage, such as a tape archive or a hierarchical storage management (HSM) system, which is a software-storage system in which data are transferred or moved between different storage media, such as high-speed (and more expensive) solid-state drive arrays and slower (and less expensive) optical disks, hard disks, and tape storage.
