Archiving

Have you figured out that I really love books yet? After reading a book called Print vs. Digital a couple of days ago, I've gotten into studying the topic of archiving. So as I usually do, I jumped straight from normal academic writing straight to the killers and am re-reading Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever. One of the interesting thoughts from it that keeps rolling around in my head is that the form, the structure of the archive itself depends on the contents of the archive. Sure, this means that art museums and libraries have different structures from each other and from concert halls, but it also means that the form of the texts (used in a very broad poststructural sense) for each kind of art vary from one another.

I've been thinking about the changing storage of information and how that is manifested in the shifts in libraries, which are our repositories for knowledge. Should they have data centers that back up the information they hold to make sure they always have access to the information they've spent many resources in acquiring and generating? And if they don't get books for you anymore, what should librarians be doing now? Do we replace librarians with computer search terminals? Of course not. They're going to become curators of the knowledge resources at the library, whether those resources are online, printed or kept in the office of some professor who's currently working on something new.