Archive(s)

Archives are set up to preserve official records and documents, with the aim of being able to retrieve information from them at a later date. Some archives, like those of the Vatican, or some European nations, have records going back for centuries. The exploits of "treasure divers" would not be possible without the Archive of the Indies with its records of the original fleets and ships.

Traditional print archives may have very rudimentary indexes, or no indexes at all.
The McCormick-International Harvester Archives at the Wisconsin Historical Society illustrates some of the challenges inherent in a massive archive.

Sensible electronic archives have really good access tools, and clearly discernible file structures. 20040124, 20040125, and 20040126 are successive daily archived comic strips from UNSHELVED -- 5 years ago.

Of course UNSHELVED's authors have it easy, because their archive grows by one item per day, so they don't need a complicated file naming structure. But they also have a search box to search by key words and dates.

ASIDE:
The word "jacket" in that key word search turns up several strips, including the one shown below from October 16, 2004, which ultimately inspired my homage photo.



end ASIDE


Some newspaper's electronic archives go back many years, in parallel with their first use of electronic systems to compose articles, and merge articles, images, captions, headlines, and advertising copy into printable pages. Our local York News-Times electronic archive has changed format several times with changing ownership.


This week's news included the revelation that President Obama will be able to continue using his Blackberry because they have figured out a way to archive "official business" in accord with the Presidential Records Act, while allowing personal and private activity to remain personal and private.

Sometimes archives allow for uses never thought of by those who assembled them. The U.S. Patent Office archive of patents issued is available online, with various indexes related to their official function. But none of those indexes or file structures provide an easy way to extract the patents with human figures in the drawings.