23 May
2005
23 May
'05
11:21 p.m.
> Make the archive useful to us, now. Let people
500 years from now
> figure it out for themselves.
That's not the definition of an
"archive". You're thinking of a library.
No, archives need to be useful now too.
Making it useful to people 500 years from now is probably impossible.
(Look at the ideographic signs they invented to put at long-term nuclear
waste sites, they eventually arrived at something but they have a lot
of constraints).
To me the distinction is that archives usually have a narrow field of
coverage while a library has a broader view. Even that doesn't work
well (look at the "Presidential libraries") in common usage.
Tim.