archives

  • Identity as a Hall of Mirrors: Descent by Lauren Russell

    Identity as a Hall of Mirrors: Descent by Lauren Russell

    This book is a marriage of the real world and the imagination, the nexus of nonfiction and fiction.

  • Keeping Time in Los Angeles

    Keeping Time in Los Angeles

    Music was noise, and noise was music, and George Antheil was on his way.

  • To the Moon: Talking with Heather Christle

    To the Moon: Talking with Heather Christle

    Heather Christle discusses her debut work of nonfiction, THE CRYING BOOK.

  • Sound & Vision: Arthur Fournier

    Sound & Vision: Arthur Fournier

    Allyson McCabe talks with Arthur Fournier, an independent dealer of books, serials, manuscripts, and archives, about how he developed his niche, and how digital access has both enriched and complicated the work of archiving and collecting.

  • Archives for the Future

    Preserving information and data archives in the digital age presents a new kind of challenge. Physical books may degrade over time, but even a book in poor condition can be taken down off a shelf and read. Digital storage devices, however,…

  • The End of a Library

    One of the great challenges of libraries and archives is preserving the collections. Not all materials decay at the same rate and while some items can last thousands of years, other items are much more fragile. Now, scientists studying hundreds…

  • Sylvia Plath’s Earliest Works

    Gothamist was recently given permission to share some of Sylvia Plath’s earliest manuscripts in a video on their website. The manuscripts, which include drawings, some of her favorite poems, and her own original poetry, are held in a private collection…

  • Inside the Secrets of NYPL’s Underground Stacks

    The New York Public Library holds more than 16 million volumes, making it the 4th largest library in the United States. Many of those volumes are stored in the Milstein stacks, two levels of the library directly under Bryant Park.…

  • Remembering Your Online Life

    After all, a toy boat is hardly its former self after a lifetime at the bottom of the sea. No matter how intact an archive, it can never fully reconstruct the texture and completeness of the original memory. For Aeon,…

  • Harvard Library’s Deep Storage

    A new interactive documentary called Cold Storage invites viewers to peer beyond Harvard’s flagship Widener Library—the tip of the iceberg in terms of the university’s massive collection—and into the vault where more than 9 million books and artifacts are stored.…

  • Digitizing Reels of History

    The British Library says it has a window of 15 years to preserve an invaluable cache of sound recordings, but unless fundraising can help pick up the pace, the archives could take as many as 48 to complete. The artifacts…

  • Weekly Geekery

    Margaret Atwood only tweets 10 minutes a day. What is the true cost of caring? Crowdsourcing is not the brave new world we imagined. Can funny tweets change the world? The Internet isn’t forever. But can it be? “The Netflix…