[	1	]
Archives	of	
Inconvenience
Rick Prelinger
Once upon a time—b ut whether in the time past or time to come 
is a matter of little or no moment—t his wide world had become so 
overburdened with an accumulation of worn-o ut trumpery, that the 
inhabitants determined to rid themselves of it by a general bonfire. 
The site fixed upon at the representation of the insurance companies, 
and as being as central a spot as any other on the globe, was one of 
the broadest prairies of the West, where no human habitation would 
be endangered by the flames, and where a vast assemblage of specta-
tors might commodiously admire the show. . . . 
“See!— see!—w hat heaps of books and pamphlets!” cried a fellow, 
who did not seem to be a lover of literature. “Now we shall have a 
glorious blaze!”
“That’s just the thing,” said a modern philosopher. “Now we shall 
get rid of the weight of dead men’s thought, which has hitherto 
pressed so heavily on the living intellect that it has been incompetent 
to any effectual self-e xertion. Well done, my lads! Into the fire with 
them! Now you are enlightening the world, indeed!” . . . 
The truth was, that the human race had now reached a stage of 
progress so far beyond what the wisest and wittiest men of for-
mer ages had ever dreamed of, that it would have been a manifest 
absurdity to allow the earth to be any longer encumbered with their 
poor achievements in the literary line. Accordingly a thorough and 
searching investigation had swept the booksellers’ shops, hawkers’ 
stands, public and private libraries, and even the little book-s helf 
by the country fireside, and had brought the world’s entire mass of 
printed paper, bound or in sheets, to swell the already mountain bulk 
of our illustrious bonfire. . . . 
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Earth’s Holocaust”
2 Fever and Fervor
On those eternally nagging questions of #archives theory, I suggest 
we stop “posing questions” and instead propose tentative answers.
— @footage, 2015–1 0– 281
Archive fever is not the same as archival fervor. Archives today are 
the center of much attention but few agendas. Archivists, users 
and theorists of archives, artists and scholars say much about the 
record and its keeping, but their voices rarely reach the public or 
leak across disciplinary boundaries. Even if these conversations 
were to coalesce, it is unlikely that the speakers would share a 
common conceptual or discursive toolbox. And if it were not for 
those working archivists who demand respect as both thinkers and 
practitioners, the intensity of contemporary interest in archives 
would be unmatched by any commitment to intervene in archival 
futures. We have reached a swirling stasis, where archives are 
active objects of contemplation and contestation, but largely left 
to themselves to craft their future shape and negotiate with those 
whose futures will be shaped by their recordkeeping efforts.
To argue that archives can inform the redistribution of power 
and resources, to advocate that archival theory and practice must 
converge, to insist on the recognition of archives as material places 
of gendered, racialized labor and poorly examined workflows, and 
to engage in actionable as well as notional archival critique—t hese 
are all assertions that we owe to thoughtful archivists more than 
to artists and scholars. We ask more from theories of knowledge 
than from the institutions where knowledge resides, and while 
we fetishize books and libraries, we all too often take for granted 
archives and the raw records they hold. Yet for reasons we should 
already know and others we have yet to learn, archives need our 
active support and continuing engagement. We therefore need to 
dive below a surface of platitudes and case-s tudy narratives that 
elevate anecdote over argument, and plot a course, no matter 
how jagged, for memory institutions in an age of precarities and 
rising waters, whether it be to negotiate uncertain alliances or 
pursue fragile autonomies. And, even as it may sometimes feel 3
paradoxical, we need to find ways to break through the strictures 
that bind archives and enclose their contents while simultaneously 
celebrating the affordances of inconvenience.
Occasions	for	Excitement
Archival work & creative practice have converged, which isn’t to say 
artists resemble archivists. Rather, archivists are the new artists.
— @footage, 2012–1 0– 07
But does the feverish world of archival innovation resemble Paris in 
the 1920s, or the USSR in the 1920s?
— @footage, 2012–1 0– 07
The recent history of archives is replete with inspiring stories of 
emergence and visibility, but it’s also a tale of neglect, of utopian 
cards unplayed, of disrespect for archival labor, and of theories 
often too diffuse to be actionable. The gap between actual and 
potential may help explain why anxiety has become the default 
mindset in the archival world. Despite these conditions, I’m opti-
mistic about the possibilities that archives afford, not only as bridg-
es between remembrance and action but as arenas of encounter 
and mobilization. Of all archival affordances we might imagine, 
historical intervention is perhaps the most exciting: in simplest 
terms, deploying records of the past in the present so as to influ-
ence possible futures. And while power accommodates resistance 
in symbolic spaces because it is easier to assimilate than resistance 
in the streets, the record itself is well suited to enable the most 
pointed and potent of rebukes. And as I will discuss later, evidence 
offers venues for uneffaced differences to play, opportunities for 
contestation and critique, and the wherewithal for rendering the 
excesses of narrativization obsolete.
My intervention—w hich I explicitly characterize as meditation 
modulated by provocation—s eeks to position archives as places 
of possibility, as places where we might seek to perform struggle, 
4 expose presentism, make theories actionable, refuse dominant 
narratives of inevitability, and imagine and stage a broad spectrum 
of futures.2 In a time when prolepsis and analepsis cycle rapidly, 
when boundaries between past/present/future manifest as blurred 
and even invisible, repositories of records are at once anchorages 
and launchpads and spaces for retrospect and rehearsal. They are 
the waysides where media temporarily reposes before it is reborn. 
And today archives are more than reflectors of extrinsic activity: 
they have also become laboratories where key social and cultural 
discourses are proposed, argued, and tested. I therefore hope that 
through more conscious and less isolated archival practices we 
may better combat the divide between theory and practice and the 
power relations this divide reinforces. I complete this text in the 
hot and fiery summer of 2018, unable to know whether archives 
will survive their current caretakers or whether our successors 
(or even ourselves) will watch the record-t rail of our species fade 
away. The futures we theorize cannot be based simply on flows of 
money and power but must also take into account both species 
fragility and environmental precarity. If archives are to ride the 
rising waves, it won’t be as arks fully caulked to repel leaks but 
as permeable wetlands capable of assimilating ebbs and flows— 
venues where past, present, and future interchange and transform 
one another. In this lies their greatest purpose and occasion for 
excitement.3
Archival work is generally taken for granted as a kind of infrastructural 
activity, but we no longer take water & energy for granted #saa12
— @footage, 2012–0 8– 11
Overtheorized	and	Underfunded
The “archive” is overtheorized; “archives” (where the labor of record 
keeping takes place) are undertheorized and underfunded. #archives
— @footage, 2015–0 2– 03
Archivists are confounded by the imprecision that exists between 
“archives,” which most archivists define as places of collecting, 
preservation, access, and archival labor, and “the archive,” which 5
I will propose as an umbrella term for conceptual, philosophical, 
artistic, literary, historical, or analytical constructs centered around 
archives and/or archival process. I don’t consider the two terms 
interchangeable. Most writers and artists have gravitated to the 
term “archive.” Some also use “the archive” and “the archives” inter-
changeably without interrogating possible differences. But the fuzz-
iness surrounding “the archives” and “the archive” vexes archivists, 
who rightfully cringe when the specificity of their workplaces— 
which are places of labor, not conceptual formulations—i s simulta-
neously invoked and ignored. An unstable amalgam of the uncon-
scious and quotidian, “the archive” has become an undemanding 
construct, deployed by the critical disciplines as they interact with 
history and memory, invoked time and again without necessarily 
requiring sharp definition, similar perhaps to a screen onto which 
traces of theory flash for long moments before fading.
“The archive” invites flirtation; the “archives,” on the other hand, 
could not be more demanding. Though their workplaces may seem 
quiet and their workflows pretend to appear apolitical, archives 
overflow with contention. To collect is to commit to the survival 
of certain records over others; to arrange and describe is often to 
enclose; to preserve is to resist power, violence, and constraint; to 
proffer access can be to invite misunderstanding and aggression. 
And yet archives yearn for praxis; even routine archival labor is 
practice in search of theory. But to how many outsiders is all of this 
visible and, moreover, urgent?
“The archive” seeks to distance itself from “the archives,” fleeing 
the inconvenience of material objects and highly gendered and 
racialized archival labor. For artists, writers, and theorists, “the 
archive” is like the Detroit that new occupiers and tourists believe 
they see: a fascinating, exotic wilderness where historical narra-
tives manifest in disconnected, free-t o-r emix fragments, populated 
by people whose needs and agency are matters left for others 
to address; a place visitors believe to be terra nullius, open for 
unchallenged occupation. Just about any contemporary artist-b uilt 
6 collection of images, objects, data, or emotions is nonspecifically 
designated “an archive,” as if to add glamor to assembly. And while 
artists and scholars express deep fascination with archives and 
thrill at touring them, they don’t think very imaginatively about real 
ones.4 With few exceptions, scholars see archives as cabinets of 
curiosities or as glorified warehouses, service organizations tasked 
with enabling their research, and they outsource the maintenance 
of their research base to workers whom they insufficiently respect.
My polarized treatment of these terms is not meant to express 
contempt but rather hope for their reunification and the reconnec-
tion of the practices to which they refer. Could we try to reconcile 
the conceptual umbrella we call “the archive” with the more 
quotidian work of “the archives”? Could we daylight both archival 
theory and practice, construct and workplace? And could we try to 
draw connections between academic, artistic, and archival labor? 
This would require greater engagement with archives as working 
entities, and a commitment not only to rendering archival labor 
visible, but seeing it as decisive.5 We might listen harder to the peo-
ple who perform archival labor and begin to reframe it as cultural 
work and research in its own right, rather than simply wage labor. 
Archives are indeed microcosms of the world whose records they 
contain and organs through which power is expressed, but power 
and the labor maintaining it exist in covalent bondage. Just as we 
cannot think of domesticity without domestic labor, and we cannot 
imagine the university without workers supporting other workers 
who are paid to produce knowledge, we can neither conceive of 
nor critique archives without taking into account the core labor of 
those who maintain them.6
Too few have considered the politics of archival workflow. This 
alone would establish cause for intervention, but the problem 
may be more fundamental than that. A nuanced and actionable 
understanding of how day-t o-d ay archival workflow both mirrors 
and sustains external structures of power requires the kind of at-
tention that art historians might pay to brushstrokes, film theorists 
to editing rhythms, and psychologists to microaggressions. How 
do the protocols of archival film inspection, the removal of staples 7
from archival documents, and best practices of photographic 
scanning contribute to power differentials and influence the way 
in which archival records can be perceived, touched, and reused?7 
Because there are no clean records: records bear the markers not 
only of their creators and those who may have used them as levers 
of power but also bear the traces of their archival lives. We should 
not expect our future archival queries to return us unmediated 
records. We might instead hope to see traces of workflow and 
markers of the record’s life in the same way we see scratches on 
old film, scribbling in old textbooks, tearstains on old letters, and 
the injuries levied by war and conflict.
Utopian Propositions
At stake . . . are not the worlds these collections claim to represent, 
but . . . the worlds they invite us to imagine & even realize #ArchiveFail
— @bspalmieri, 2014–1 1– 108
Could we discard our predispositions and instead propose a few 
whimsical and utopian archival propositions?
—A storage and delivery infrastructure for evidence 
and memory that is as reliable as city water or gravity- 
propelled Roman sewage systems and flexible enough 
to remember or forget as needed
—A data corpus that surrounds us like air, manifest- 
ing itself through our sensorium and the tools with  
which we augment our bodies; alternatively, a mycelial 
network that feeds on data to propagate and  
spread
—Loci of preservation of information and ideas capable of 
collecting both the canonical and the quotidian, person-
al and institutional, hegemonic and oppositional
—An anticipatory network that sniffs out, appraises, and 
collects records of potential interest
8 —A fully permeable repository that supports a spectrum 
of access from casual inquiry to deep touching
—An agnostic system that dissolves formalistic distinc-
tions between physical and digital materials
—A suite of preservation functions that simultaneously 
support centralized and decentralized storage schemes
—A repository that embodies the power of the record 
while simultaneously disavowing it, that is to say invok-
ing both privilege and antiprivilege
—A curatorial algorithm that doesn’t automatically reject 
garble and glitch
—A utility that familiarizes us with its holdings through 
convenience and defamiliarizes them through 
inconvenience
—An entity that in its scope and outreach crosses anach-
ronistic species boundaries
Even those who never dream of utopia recognize that traditional 
archives deliver much less than they might. They’re compromised 
by their institutional parentage and bureaucratic structure, gated 
rather than hospitable, excessively deferential to copyright claims 
that may never materialize from rightsholders that may not exist, 
and underresourced islands of precarity in a rich world. These 
deficiencies separate archives from scholars, who can’t always get 
the records they want in the timeframe and manner they want; 
from the young, who don’t accept pre-I nternet limits on informa-
tion access; and from communities whose records are separated 
from them forever, enclosed by irrevocable deeds of gift, physical 
barriers, and access regulations.9
But short of utopias, there could be other models. Archives as 
cities. Could we better understand the trajectories, flows, inputs, 
outputs, and power relations embedded in and reproduced by 
archives by thinking of them in the ways we think of cities? To 
amplify: archives grow, flourish, die, and morph much like cities do. 9
Both, of course, are repositories of information, experience, and 
dynamic affect. Both are meccas where unaffiliated records and 
people find community with others; both are machines of encoun-
ters, exchanges, mashings-u p. Both take in information and energy 
and transform it. Both combine territories of enclosure with tracts 
of openness, abiding under a spectrum of control that is constantly 
pulsing and sliding as authority reconfigures itself. And in both 
deference to power coexists with hospitality to resistance. Might 
we look to the city as a way to better understand the relationship 
of the record to the present? And might we look to archives as a 
laboratory for constructing new urbanist schemes? Archives, after 
all, are a cheaper arena than architecture.10
On the other hand, are utopian propositions just another projec-
tion of external intentions onto the archives, treating them as terra 
nullius? As a professional archivist told me in 2012, “I just like to 
arrange things.”
Do	Physical	Objects	Have	a	Right	to	Exist?
Reporting from northern New Jersey: it’s a frightfully cold winter 
morning in January 2011, and I’m driving through an industrial 
area on a road that disappears and reappears, trying to steer 
between giant ice ponds and the deepest potholes I’ve ever seen. 
The Manhattan skyline isn’t very far away—p erhaps six miles or 
so— but if that’s the center of the media industry, this is the edge, 
the place where inconvenient objects go to die. Hidden somewhere 
in this snowy backwater are the vaults where major movie studios, 
networks, and distributors store what remains of their nitrate film 
collections. Municipal fire codes zoned nitrate film out of most 
major cities many years ago, except for a handful of grandfathered 
facilities that were built in the early twentieth century. My desti-
nation is one of the two commercial nitrate storage facilities left 
on the East Coast, which has been sold and is soon to become just 
another obsolete North Jersey industrial site. Right now specially 
trained truckers are waiting with engines running to move film 
10 someone still wants to own somewhere else. I’m here for the same 
reason I’ve haunted film vaults and loading docks in the Rust Belt 
and the Northeast for almost thirty years: to pick up a collection 
nobody wants. It’s hard to believe people aren’t clamoring to save 
this material, but they’re not. No matter how wonderful might be 
the images it holds, this is nitrate film, and it’s a thoroughly unde-
sirable commodity.
While few people know much about the fine points of archival 
practice, just about everybody’s heard about the flammability of 
nitrate film, and this has given rise to the widespread miscon-
ception that old film is inherently dangerous. Like most urban 
legends, those that have spawned around nitrate can be traced 
back to actual events and partial truths. Huge fires have erupted 
in film exchanges (warehouses holding films to be sent out to 
theaters) and projection booths. And yes, several tons of nitrate 
X- ray film stored in the Cleveland Clinic basement and ignited by 
an uncovered 100-w att light bulb caught fire in May 1929, killing 
123 people, mostly by asphyxiation from the gas that burning 
nitrate emits.11 And it’s indeed true that water won’t extinguish 
nitrate fires: filmed experiments, legendary among archivists, show 
burning reels submerged in water, bubbling under the surface as 
the film generates its own oxygen, and raised from the water only 
to rekindle into bright flame. Nitrate is indeed hazardous material, 
and it needs special attention when stored, transported, projected, 
and copied. But much of the fuss over nitrate film is starting to look 
more like a moral panic than a safety issue.12 And what I’m going to 
learn on this visit to the vaults is that the nitrate film issue perfectly 
exemplifies a question that I think is about to move from bubbling 
to burning: do physical objects have a right to exist?
Archivists are drawn to nitrate as to an unstable partner; beautiful 
and dangerous, nitrate embodies all the clichés of bipolarity. 
Experienced archivists inculcate emerging archivists with a sense 
of caution as they stand at their benches winding rolls of film. 
But while pragmatic hazmat precautions are one thing, nitrate’s 
long-t erm influence on archivists’ senses of self and mission is 11
quite another. A dramatist seeking to find archetypal characters 
in the archives might first unpack the mystique of nitrate, whose 
flammability masks far more subversive powers.13
Let’s stipulate: all media is ephemeral. Nitrate deteriorates and 
burns with an adrenalin-a ctivating hissy flame; safety-b ase 
(acetate) film quietly shrinks and shrivels in irreversible vinegar 
syndrome; much color film fades; videotape and DVDs flake and 
rot, and as yet we have no proven strategies for preserving the 
uncountable number of bits that we’re accumulating in the digital 
era. But nitrate’s ephemerality is sensational, mythological. Pioneer 
film archivists often hid films from fire marshals who might want 
to destroy them and copyright holders that might want to seize 
them, and this mixture of caution and stealth imbued archival 
culture with a deep sense of archivist-a s-g uardian and archivist-a s- 
last- chance- savior. Relevant keywords: secrecy, fragility, jeopardy, 
urgency. When U.S. archivists started to decloset and coordinate 
film preservation efforts under the banner of the American Film 
Institute in the 1970s, they sought a soundbite for public consump-
tion, and reformulated Canadian archivist Sam Kula’s battle cry 
“Nitrate Will Not Wait” into “Nitrate Won’t Wait!” Likening film to 
a critically endangered whooping crane that might, if neglected, 
turn into an extinct ivory-b illed woodpecker, archivists portrayed 
themselves as the last line of defense against time and decom-
position, heroically snatching film foot by foot from its seemingly 
inevitable destiny. Since hardly anyone else had stepped forward to 
systematically preserve films at that point, this wasn’t an inaccurate 
characterization, but the exact nature of nitrate’s impatience 
remained mysterious. To this day we know far too little about 
the chemistry of nitrate deterioration, though we have at least 
discovered that cold and dry storage dramatically lengthens the life 
of film. Widely disseminated statistics (still repeated today, though 
now understood to be exaggerated) proclaimed that 90 percent 
of silent film heritage had disappeared.14 Film studies and film 
fandom internalized a permanent discourse of loss as cinephiles 
12 lamented the disappearance of works they would never see. And in 
the same way that exaggerated reports of child molestation gave 
rise to “no touching” rules in schools, film retreated into archives, 
becoming a hothouse flower to be handled as little as possible, 
untouchable except by anointed archivists. Perhaps the preserva-
tion movement needed a moral panic to take root, but the legacy 
of the nitrate scare, combined with bureaucratic inertia and fears 
of copyright infringement, has been to institutionalize archival 
enclosure. Because film needs to be preserved to be protected, 
most archival holdings cannot be seen or used unless they’ve first 
undergone one or another expensive process: digitization or film- 
to- film preservation. This is also true for deteriorating videotapes 
that can’t survive repeated plays, as they’re being digitized or 
preserved into another format.
I’ve come to the Kearny vaults to pack and move two stock-f ootage 
libraries that once belonged to Hollywood studios. We’ve all seen 
this kind of material time and again without thinking to ask what 
it is. While the kinds of film I collect and sell for stock footage 
use revel in their antiquity, studio stock footage is stealthy; it’s 
not supposed to call attention to itself. The intention is for us to 
believe the studio actually sent a camera crew to Shanghai, to the 
Lower East Side, or to the North Pole expressly for the film we’re 
watching. Material shot for one picture, if sufficiently generic and 
free of known performers’ faces, was salvaged and meticulously 
indexed for possible use in future films. Stock footage archives are 
among the least celebrated image collections, but their contents 
delight: there are locations around the world, including incredible 
documentation of U.S. cities in the 1930s and 1940s, cans full of 
galloping horses’ hoofs, gangsters’ cars swerving around corners, 
hands firing revolvers, mirror balls rotating, and miniature models 
of buildings swaying in simulated earthquakes. And—m ost exciting 
of all— there are the process plates.15
When classic-e ra actors rode in a taxi, sat in a dining car, flew a 
plane, or fled the sheriff’s posse, a rear projection of the world 
moved behind them. Specially shot scenes—p rocess plates—w ere 13
projected on background screens in front of which they performed. 
Since actors and screens weren’t in the same focal plane, the back-
grounds often seemed out of focus, jumpy, distorted in the films 
as released. But when you view the process plates by themselves, 
they couldn’t be clearer—t hey’re rocksteady, razor sharp, detail- 
rich images of a world that no longer exists. As I write, I’m watching 
one: it’s 5th Street in downtown Los Angeles, sometime in the early 
1940s. Fifth Street was Skid Row then, and today it’s still a sad, dis-
enfranchised slice of the city, most of its small stores and houses 
demolished in favor of blank-w alled structures hiding social-s ervice 
organizations or light-i ndustrial shops. But in the world revealed 
by the process plate, we ride around the block with camera set at 
a three- quarter reverse angle, enjoying a relaxed, meditative view 
of a sidewalk where working-c lass men amble and storekeepers 
take the air outside their shops. This isn’t a fleeting image of a lost 
landscape that we wish could have lasted longer, but a sixty-s econd 
immersion in the past that enables universal time travel. Along 
the way the camera car passes a hand-p ainted wall advertisement 
promoting a natural-f oods restaurant. “Live a Hundred Years,” the 
ad promises.
There are thousands of process plates in this collection. They’re 
perfectly suited to establish locations in historical documenta-
ries, and perhaps more interestingly, serve as backgrounds and 
templates for new digital simulations of the past. But they can 
also play all by themselves. I want to use them to strengthen the 
case for using unedited footage as an element in itself—t o help 
establish a new evidentiary cinema that’s based on information, 
not simply on actors and stories, and to help rethink the structure 
of documentary films. Following the lead of retired Berkeley 
scholar Bertrand Augst, I have always thought of films not simply 
as seamless, extended narratives but rather as instances of 
parataxis— assemblies of semi-a utonomous segments that one 
might liken to walls built from irregularly shaped bricks. Now, many 
miles away from a classroom, I will see vaults filled with cans filled 
14 with leftover segments stored away after completion of the films 
for which they were shot. I will see alternate takes of films by many 
famous directors; dogfight footage from wartime films whose titles 
many of us remember; atmospheric scenes of San Francisco shot 
for noirish features, and can after can of outtakes from Westerns: 
horses in the pen, desert scenes, pans over mountainous land-
scapes. There is three-s trip Technicolor, two-s trip Cinecolor, and 
single-s trand 35mm monopack, a delicately beautiful film stock 
much like Kodachrome that was never directly projected onto a 
screen and flourished so briefly that even the deepest film buffs 
have rarely seen it.
I arrive at this low-s lung complex of twenty vaults marked only with 
a hand-p ainted street address, located behind a gate that no longer 
closes and in front of a creek that occasionally overflows onto the 
cans stored on the bottom racks. For a moment I’m at a loss trying 
to find the office, until I realize it’s the only door that’s not an old 
steel- jacketed asbestos fire door secured with a padlock. Inside 
this small, worn room sit Bill and Mike, the two vault managers, 
whose kindness and sense of humor seem completely unaffected 
by the certain knowledge that their redundancy is imminent. Today 
they’re working with a group of experienced truckers, members 
of a tiny group of elite movers who handle nitrate shipments 
between vaults and archives. No ordinary cargo, nitrate is treated 
as hazardous material. While it travels via ordinary freight carriers, 
federal regulations require hazmat-t rained personnel to prepare 
and pack it, according to protocols that seem more suited to 
nuclear materials than outdated entertainment. Nobody recounts 
urban legends about nitrate and its flammability this morning, but 
the vault managers are having a great time pulling up YouTubes of 
truck accidents, especially wrecked hazmat transports.
Outside the vaults, a group of temporary workers dodge one 
another on the snowy, narrow catwalk as they pack cans of nitrate 
film according to federal regulations. After rolling a newly painted 
steel barrel into position, a worker fills the bottom third of the 
barrel with urethane packing peanuts. Onto this cushion he lowers 
a plastic bag containing precisely 18 cans (totaling roughly 18,000 15
feet, 200 minutes of film) and surrounds the bag with more pea-
nuts. He works a lid into place, tapping it with a mallet to ensure a 
tight seal, and bolts it tight with a six-i nch bolt and a power wrench. 
As he rolls each barrel up a steep ramp into the waiting trailer, his 
feet slip and slide on the icy surface. There are 18 cans per barrel, 
120 barrels per trailer, 2160 cans per shipment. If it could carry un-
limited weight, and if there were no hazmat regulations, the same 
trailer could carry ten times as many cans. Plastic peanuts blow in 
the wind, roll under barrels, get ground into pieces by handtruck 
wheels, and mix into snow and mud. I imagine they’ll inhabit the 
northern New Jersey environment long after all the nitrate has 
disappeared from the world’s cultural repositories.
When the trailer has been loaded to spec, it’s the drivers’ turn. The 
companies they work for charge mightily to move nitrate; quotes 
I’ve seen come in at about ten dollars per can for a cross-c ountry 
move. Compared to the costs of destroying unwanted nitrate film, 
that’s small potatoes—l egal destruction can cost up to fifty dollars 
a can, and sometimes destruction is a necessity, especially when 
the perceived value of the film fails to measure up to the very 
real difficulties involved in its care. I’ve never met these drivers 
before, but as we start to talk I realize they are unsung players in 
the ecosystems of media management and film preservation. They 
know the organization and layout of vaults all over the country, 
which collections they hold, and their custodians. Two of them 
tell me about the two weeks they just spent in Chicago backing 
fifty-t hree- foot trailers through narrow alleys so as to move my 
friend J. Fred MacDonald’s collection when it was acquired by the 
Library of Congress. While they may not themselves hold archival 
jobs, they protect and transport some of America’s most valuable 
cultural resources, and act as de facto archivists while film is 
moving between vaults, the time that it is most vulnerable.
Mike opens the vaults I’m going to be working in. There are five 
of them, each an unembellished concrete bunker rented by a 
particular studio or distributor, filled with metal racks on which sit 
16 cans of film, some square, some round, some rusty. The rooms 
are very dirty, and the lights don’t always work. At the back of the 
vault a vent allows air to pass in and out, but its purpose isn’t air 
circulation— it’s a relief vent that, in case of a fire, would route an 
explosive pressure wave out the back of the vault so that the roof 
won’t blow off. The vaults open up directly to the outside world. 
At one time there was some sort of temperature and humidity 
control, but it’s no longer working, and the owners have decided to 
rely on the winter weather for the cheapest cooling and dehumidi-
fication they can buy.
But first I have to get these cans out of this rather unpleasant 
and freezing-c old vault. Wedged between two iron pipes, they sit 
upright, rather than flat on a shelf, as we shelve cans today. This 
means that the rolls of film inside the cans rest vertically, which 
may cause them to warp or bend. And since many stock footage 
cans are shelved on the bottom rack (a testimony to their lack of 
importance to the studio that sentenced them to dead storage), 
they’ve been baptized more than once by the waters of the neigh-
boring creek, and I can see that the down-f acing corner of many 
square cans has rusted out, and that the rolls of film at the bottom 
of the cans often show signs of mold and immersion.
All of this is being junked by its owners. Some of it, in fact, was 
junked once before; this is not the first time it’s being saved. It 
might seem odd that its current owners—m asters at repurposing 
old assets for new markets—d on’t want this material, but it would 
be unjust to accuse them of a crime against historical memory. 
They have in fact agreed to donate it to the nonprofit Internet 
Archive, with whom I work, in order that we may put it online and 
make it available to today’s media makers. But this is only one 
of many such collections that have become surplus to corporate 
needs. And their surplusness returns me to my question, which ar-
chivists aren’t asking, even softly: Do physical cultural objects have 
a right to exist? Some, like those in this collection, are uncollectible. 
It is an authentic archives of inconvenience.
Analog,	Revalidated	and	Devaluated 17
I worry that we won’t be strong enough to prevent digital stewardship 
from becoming analog neglect.
— @footage, 2013–0 7– 23
It’s been my good fortune to be able to engage in potlatching, an 
ancient privilege newly reborn with the Internet, since I began 
collaborating with Internet Archive in 1999 to build an online repos-
itory of freely downloadable archival moving images documenting 
social relations, persuasion and propaganda, place, race, gender, 
domesticity, travel, and industry (Prelinger and Internet Archive 
2000). A project without a mission statement risks failure or irre-
levance but also implies the possibility of constant reframing, and 
this one has taken unexpected directions. I have seen the barriers 
that often separate archival collections from those who would use 
them melt away, and have had the satisfaction of seeing materials 
that had long sat quietly on steel shelves pushed out to anyone 
who might be interested. Since its launch at the end of 2000, our 
online collection has supported approximately 160 million access 
events. Materials that were once marginalized as dated ephemera 
have been able to float outside the time and cultural frames in 
which they were produced and find their way into an unknowable 
number of derivative works, remixable with or without concern for 
their historicity. Concurrently, however, these 7,000 moving image 
files live on the Web to serve the development of visual history, to 
illustrate and hopefully problematize complex ideas and claims, 
and to serve the evidentiary needs of existing and emergent social 
movements. The evidence they embody retains context but is also 
free to shed its provenance, and this body of complex documenta-
tion now lives not simply within a single archival classification and 
retrieval system but as Net infrastructure, which is the greatest 
honor an archives can receive. Ultimately I hope the collection will 
deeply embed itself within digital humanities projects and also 
serve as a testbed for computationally based projects carried out 
by posthuman agents. The volume of home movies, for instance, 
18 is so great that their second audience (following the families 
that made them) is likely to be principally composed of analytic 
machines.
This experience turned me into a rabid proponent of pushing 
archival materials out to the world regardless of whether there was 
an expressed or substantiated need. I learned that an archives’ 
highest calling is to be consumed by its users. I tried to convince 
my moving image archives colleagues to support mass digitiza-
tion of their collections, and worked with Internet Archive in the 
mid- 2000s to help build out an open path for mass book scanning 
that functioned as an alternative to Google’s then highly closed 
and secretive books project. Joining a small group of digitization 
evangelists who fanned out across the Euro-A merican cultural 
sphere, I tried to encourage cultural custodians to make peace with 
digitality and choose openness.
But concurrently I was working with my partner Megan to build a 
physical library in San Francisco, which has been open to the public 
since 2004 (Prelinger and Prelinger 2018). To those who have not 
visited, this may seem strangely retrograde, but it was and is a 
thoroughly antinostalgic project. Our principal (if unvoiced) idea 
was to experiment with opening a repository of physical materials 
to a noninstitutional community and see what might happen. In the 
absence of a hypothesis the lessons were even more surprising. 
We learned very quickly to dismiss all sense of analog nostalgia or 
digital supersession. It became clear that, to transcode a formula-
tion from poet and artist Jen Bervin, physical and digital materials 
each had different but closely related jobs to do.16 Analog and 
digital affordances were not only distinct, but codependent—a s 
it happened, the physical books served as pointers to the down-
loadable digital copies scanned at Internet Archive, and Google’s 
index of Internet Archive’s online books helped us find books on 
our uncatalogued shelves. It was pointless to overthink the digital 
turn or to harp on analog/digital antinomies, unless you were 
talking about obvious attributes like weight, physical bulk, and 
dependence on electron flow, or unless you needed conflict for an 
otherwise pedestrian news story. Since then I’ve been convinced 19
that analog-d igital hybridity is not a transitional state, and I’d hope 
it remains a permanent one. Scanning, after all, is just the newest 
of the book arts.
In my work with our library and my film archives I’ve come to 
realize that the turn to digital revalidates the analog. I make digital 
films that play before audiences who talk while the film runs. I 
thought this was radical, until I realized I was actually channeling 
the Elizabethan theater whose front pit was filled with loud and 
boisterous groundlings.17 Hybridized analog and digital. But while 
digitality may revalidate analog, it’s rapidly devaluing it. Physical 
objects are being disposed of and destroyed at an accelerated rate 
(which is one reason we’ve been able to collect so much interesting 
stuff for our library and so much film has come to us for shipping 
costs alone). That highly impertinent question for librarians and 
archivists— do physical objects still have the right to exist?—o ften 
seems these days to be settled in the negative. Shelves are emptier 
and stacks shrunken in many libraries. While collectors responsible 
to no one but themselves make piecemeal decisions to collect 
objects that match their fancies, libraries and archives are faced 
with time-c onsuming and difficult decisions as to whether to bear 
the expense of collecting, organizing, cataloging, and preserving 
dead and dying media. Even if the cost of digitization pursued at 
scale has dropped, predigitization processing (paging books from 
the stacks, inspecting materials for fitness before they go through 
robotically assisted scanning processes, cleaning and preparing 
reels of film or videotape for scanning, inspecting phonograph 
records, then performing quality assurance on files and returning 
source materials to proper shelf locations, and so on) is inherently 
artisanal and can be costly. Recent experience is also teaching us 
that scanning is not a one-t ime process, and that we will rescan 
originals from time to time as our perceptions of what constitutes 
an acceptable digital surrogate evolve along with our technical abil-
ities. From the outside, the choices librarians and archivists make 
may seem easy to criticize, but these are not simple decisions.
20 Sometimes it’s unthinkable to destroy original documents after 
filming or digitizing them, sometimes not. As with people, society 
sorts physical objects into classes. At the bottom level are work-
aday paper documents designed for specific purposes at specific 
times: cancelled checks, invoices, technical documentation, letters, 
and the like. A bit higher ranking (but not that high) are published 
materials of an ephemeral nature, frequently revised and re-
freshed; I’m thinking of telephone directories, newspapers, legal 
materials, and reference books. Some materials in this category, 
like The New York Times, carry recognized historical importance, but 
few of them are retained in physical form. Higher still are published 
materials invested with long-t erm or permanent value, like schol-
arly books, academic journals, many magazines and periodicals, 
maps, and government documents—t hough increasingly libraries 
are planning shared print repositories where a few “copies of last 
resort” stand in for many widely distributed copies soon to be no 
more. At the highest level reside rare books, special collections, 
manuscripts and original photographic images. The emergent sta-
tus of digital materials has not yet challenged the auratic primacy 
of these objects.
And yet—a  systematic downgrading of media forms seems to be 
in progress as the specific affordances of old-f ashioned platforms 
like film, broadcast television, audiotape, and Kodachrome slides 
are flattening into digital modes of storage and display. I do not 
mean to minimize the depth, novelty, or importance of digital 
affordances, but I perceive the disorganized diversity of extinct 
analog media disappearing into files that (if the walled gardens 
of the entertainment industry allow) are capable of playing and 
recombining freely across a plurality of devices. Media that used 
to rank high on the auratic scale is trickling down; we’re witnessing 
the impoverishment of the genteel classes. Librarians, archivists 
(and, to be fair, custodians of almost all forms of the historical 
record) have sinned. They have avoided engagement with records 
in inconvenient formats; they have deaccessioned, weeded, 
discarded, recycled, pulped. They have reformatted inconvenient 
records into new forms that may for a time seem more compact, 21
readable, accessible, persistent.
Today’s persistence is tomorrow’s ephemerality, just as today’s 
ephemerality is tomorrow’s persistence. #archives #bewaredigital 
exclusivity
— @footage, 2018–0 3– 31
The crisis ecosystem of evidence-b earing physical objects and 
their displacement in favor of digital surrogates is akin to urban 
gentrification, and as scholars and as a society we will one day 
have to answer for it. The attributes of physical materials like 
books and vinyl records are not falling out of use, even if they 
have lost their universality. I cannot completely describe the many 
affordances of books and paper, but they are sufficient to inhibit 
the total conquest of e-b ooks.18 Preserving how we experience and 
apprehend the record is as much an archival objective as preserv-
ing what the record contains. And the system in which the record is 
created, transmitted, and distributed is itself a fragile assembly of 
information in need of archival attention. As media archaeologists 
look at platforms of production and distribution, they may find the 
leaders, cans, and shipping containers that surround films to be of 
greater interest than the films themselves.19
But no matter how many we successfully discard, physical objects 
are incredibly persistent, and their persistence is inconvenient. 
They’re the table scraps, the leftovers of digitization, and there 
aren’t enough dogs around the table to gobble them down. We are 
basing entire new phenomenological and philosophical agendas (to 
say nothing of how we configure scholarship) on one single itera-
tion of technology—t he digital turn—a nd we seem to be fighting a 
scorched- earth path through physical materials in order to make 
room for apparent digital abundance.
This issue was very much on my mind several months before I vis-
ited the nitrate vault in New Jersey, and as I got more and more en-
thusiastic about the neglected cans nobody wanted, I remembered 
22 a story I had recently heard during THATCamp in San Francisco, a 
loose “unconference” attended by scholars, geeks, librarians, and 
archivists, attempting to get people collaborating on digital human-
ities tools and projects. Archives were a recurrent topic, and there 
was tremendous interest in leveraging archival holdings to enable 
new scholarship, build new applications, and modulate the physical 
world with historical data using augmented-r eality technology. 
There were also provocative moments. My big takeaway turned 
out to be a throwaway, a comment tossed off during yet another 
discussion about the importance of metadata—d ata that describes 
the contents and structure of information, or perhaps more easily 
remembered, “data about data.” Someone who had previously 
worked at an unsuccessful mapping data company explained what 
happened when the company closed down and its workers rushed 
to find safe homes for its assets, which were mostly data. This, 
he told us, was difficult, and it was harder because of the need to 
describe the contents and organization of the data to potential 
purchasers. “Data,” he said, “is a liability.”
Tape is a liability. Film is a liability. These are incendiary statements. 
It might be more precise to say that “aging data is a liability,” or that 
“old media is a liability.” But just as a society should judge itself by 
how well it takes care of its most vulnerable members, archivists 
might similarly dedicate themselves to collecting, preserving, and 
providing access to words, images, and sounds fixed in dead or 
dying media. Archivists are in the same position today as the brave 
librarians who guarded in vain hundreds of millions of volumes like 
Congressional Record, 1920s-e ra romance novels, and old telephone 
books. Whether or not digitization and destruction of inconvenient 
materials is appropriate is indeed a difficult question, but that’s 
a question for a discussion that rarely seems to happen. In the 
past, I’ve suggested that we take a leaf from environmentalism and 
require “digitization impact statements” and “preservation impact 
statements” when we undertake grand projects, in order to better 
understand their broad cultural and historical impact (Prelinger 
2010). In any case, I don’t think that decisions to migrate and 
destroy material should be made in private. While a single decision 23
may seem trivial or obvious, the sum of many decisions will change 
history.
May I just say it again: Loss is to be avoided when possible, but it’s 
also formative. New histories arise around loss. #pda15 #pda2015
— @footage, 2015–0 4– 24
@mchris4duke: Marginalized, persecuted people have had to destroy 
their own history for their safety. Loss isn’t random. #rbms15
— @john_overholt, 2015–0 6– 2620
I do not universally mourn the loss of physical records. While I 
condemn intentional destruction of records in order to suppress 
histories and annihilate identities, I’ve come to believe that loss can 
be formative. Absences, too, may be necessary to protect marginal-
ized communities and their cultures, as I will note later. We pursue 
research precisely because we perceive gaps in the record, or 
because we come to recognize that the powerful have suppressed 
evidence about the powerless. Many of the emergent histories of 
the last fifty years (African American, womens’, labor, daily life, and 
disability, to cite just a few) have moved toward the scholarly center 
precisely because the need was felt to remediate disappearance or 
absence. We must learn to work with inevitable loss and, as many 
archivists have suggested, render absences in the archives as prom-
inent as presences, while sometimes recognizing their necessity. 
The analog losses we mourn today will be as nothing compared to 
the digital losses we are already beginning to experience.
Destabilized	Digitality
@footage: “the archivist’s job is to hack media, so that it can be pre-
served against its will.” #orphans10
— @snowdenbecker, 2016–0 4– 0721
I have so far mostly spoken of physical materials. Don’t digital ma-
terials permit us to slip the surly bonds of paper and film and touch 
the face of data itself?
24 Digitality is inconvenient in its own ways. Despite its apparent 
victory over physicality, digitality is fragile. It requires a compliant 
social order, the accommodation of governments, and the steady 
availability of energy. It is not a monolith; the Chinese digital world 
works differently than the North American. And its corporate struc-
tures and business models are experimental. We cannot overreact 
today to a force that will behave differently tomorrow.
The air of romantic obsolescence that surrounds a lot of histor-
ical media and communications technology today carries quite 
an allure, and we might actually enlist it to help build a bridge 
between media archaeologists and the public, but it isn’t quite 
as defamiliarizing as some media archaeologists might suggest. 
While landscapes of deindustrialized cities are rich texts filled 
with evidentiary threads implicating many players, most visitors 
see only ruin porn.22 Dead media, failed kludges, speculative 
engineering ventures that pass neither usability nor smell tests 
and express poorly integrated relationships between information 
and its embodiments are all deeply fascinating, but we need to 
squeeze those “neglected margins” hard. And yet anything we can 
do to alienate the unreasonable faith much of the world seems 
to have in the robustness and persistence of the digital would 
be most welcome. As long, perhaps, as we are not fetishizing the 
digital glitch, the drop-o ut, the rotten bit. For digital media whose 
persistence depends on recurrent and heroic human intervention, 
preservation itself is the ultimate glitch, far more consequential 
than any scrambled screen.
Many archivists also fetishize extinct media technologies. They are 
the ones buying all those old film projectors. They sit up at night 
worrying not about their eBay overspending but about digital 
precarity. The archival axioms of permanence and provenance 
don’t remap well into the digital domain, where everything is as 
fragile as the next spike, brownout, or coronal mass ejection and 
bits thought to be lost can resurface in forgotten directories. In the 
aggregate, archivists have thought a great deal about the impli-
cations and contradictions of digital archives, but like many who 
present as futurists, they have yet to reflect on how these peculiar 25
datasets will function socially.
Digital archives are already pervasive. They might be total—m eaning 
they are not simply reservoirs of information that supports power 
but organs of power as well, like transmission lines that store as well 
as propagate energy (Jardine and Kelty 2016). Both archivists and 
nonarchivists try to track and parse the disruptions that digital media 
and repositories have brought to the disciplines that our prede-
cessors (and even some of us, if we’re old enough) secretly hoped 
we could follow in peace and privilege until our temporary abilities 
faded. And digital archives embody archival inconvenience skinned in 
new interfaces. It’s all too evident that engineers have a great deal to 
do with the design of digital archives; they tend to route around what 
they perceive as inconvenience. The early 2010s will be remembered 
as a time when the ease (if not the precision) of Google searches 
rendered older databases inadequate, and the first hit more often 
than not was the greatest hit. Google’s deep pockets enabled the 
company to hide great intelligence behind a deceptively simple 
search box, which we now expect to see on almost every webpage 
even if we don’t quite understand where and how it probes. At the 
same time digital libraries are still industriously writing grants to 
simulate the serendipity produced for free in library stacks.
As digital repositories become more complex and diverse, they get 
harder to classify. The databases become soupier, less structured. 
The loci of intelligence shifts from structured data to smarter 
queries, as I surmise we’re seeing with Google searches. But the 
engineering goal remains the same: to link queries more closely to 
results. This is hard for the flâneur in me to accept. What happened 
to the cyberpunk idea of oneness, of being the data, of jacking 
(hacking) into datasets whose bits directly acted on the senses? 
There’s little serendipity in the hidden algorithms tucked away 
in a black box. In their insatiable hunger for facts as distraction, 
Bouvard and Pécuchet would have warmed to the Web for its 
linkability, but I imagine Google would have frustrated them; a  
machine that always returned answers to specific questions 
26 instead of setting them on excursions into wholly new disciplines 
would have rendered impossible the intellectually picaresque jour-
ney of the two copy clerks and denied the novel its reason to exist.
Query-b ased searches are inevitably reductive. Deeper research re-
lies on confronting inconvenience and capitalizing on its attributes. 
And if we are to resist the intentional dumbing-d own of digital tools 
and services, we have little recourse but to return, once in awhile, 
to analog materials.
I once thought digital would define classical language & analog the 
vulgar tongue, but I now think the opposite is starting to come true.
— @footage, 2013–0 8– 15
Reverse digital divide: At times I’ve felt part of a digital vanguard: 
making CD-R OMs with the Voyager Company in the early and mid- 
1990s. Putting archival films online. Scanning books from our little 
library. Feeling for my friends on the other side of what was then a 
digital crevasse. But now it’s different. Digitality and privilege have 
been inverted. Speaking personally with a bureaucrat, collecting 
and touching artisanal objects, writing with a fountain pen—t hese 
are privileged encounters. The rest of the world wrestles with 
voicemail menus, cheaply made goods, and poorly designed gov-
ernmental websites. There are no stray bits in your slow food. And 
slow media is all the rage. Some friends are building an intentional 
community in Mendocino County, on the northern California coast. 
They’re installing fiber on their farm, but it transmits data slowly, 
and when I visited, their Internet service went on between 6:00 
and 7:30 am and midnight to 2:00 am. One of the consequences of 
the universalization of digital labor and the blurring of the barrier 
between online work and recreation may well be a retreat from 
digitality by those who can afford to do so.
Stories and Theories
If we really believe humans are a “storytelling species” why do enter-
tainers, filmmakers, curators repeat this statement so incessantly?
— @footage, 2013–0 8– 18
Our newly ex-L ibrarian of Congress James Billington liked to say: 27
“Stories unite people, theories divide them” (quoted in Mariano and 
Norton, 2011). I always hoped for the opposite to come true. As 
Brecht hoped for his epic theater, I place high priority on dividing 
the audience, and at least for a time I hoped the world would unite 
around certain theories. And I remain unconvinced of the centrality 
and absolute value of what today many people call “storytelling.” 
Storytelling, ubiquitous in almost all documentary and historical 
media intended for public consumption, is characterized by a high-
ly traditional representational strategy that may include the om-
nipresence of characters (often good and evil) and a conventional 
act- based narrative arc in which seemingly insurmountable prob-
lems are generally solved (Prelinger 2009). It is often stated that 
storytelling is hardwired in human consciousness, but I disagree; I 
believe it is acculturated and culturally specific. The ambiguity and 
enigmatic nature of images and evidence, which might take us in 
so many directions, is forced into the most opportune channel to 
establish a story that can be told within the bounds of budget and 
mass comprehension, a story that succeeds and thus contributes 
to a sort of narrative triumphalism. Not every tale is treated fairly 
by this tactic. And in fact most of the evidence we see drawn from 
archives is overtold, encrusted with narrative. By contrast, I seek to 
find a place for foregrounding the record itself with relatively little 
“storytelling.” In other words, I attempt to encourage new kinds of 
negotiation between the document and its users, and let a more- 
or- less contextualized, or even decontextualized document find its 
own path. This could mean trusting evidence over interpretation. 
Evidence can be its own narrative; storytelling is a special interest.
I work by arranging evidence as best I can. For the past ten years, 
I have made films out of home movies and other archival film 
materials without using music, sound design, narration, or visual 
effects. I rely on audiences to make their own soundtrack—i n other 
words, to talk their way through my films. I encourage them to 
identify familiar places, people, and events; to ask questions; to 
dispute the assertions of their neighbors; to find a place for their 
28 voices in the film while it is playing, and thus to determine where 
and how the film progresses. Home movies play a key role in these 
films. Evidence might be trustworthy in the morning and devious 
in the afternoon, and the editor’s grip might vary in strength, but 
there is something irreducibly honest about a document made 
by a nonprofessional who is motivated, as with most home movie 
makers, by love for their subject. This is not a universal stance or 
a normative form of filmmaking, but avoiding overnarrativization 
lets me breathe more freely, and it validates archival documents 
over storylines that may have little to do with the documents 
themselves.23
Archives could push back against the terms that restrain how far 
publicly practiced and received histories can stretch. To do this 
doesn’t just mean foregrounding underrepresented narratives and 
records that have been suppressed by force and violence, but ac-
tively daylighting records that represent anomalies, that document 
uneffaced differences—p ersonalities, cultures, and technologies 
that don’t fit into simplistic, dominant timelines and that refute 
narratives of triumphalism and progress—a nd allow them to play 
freely. Home movies, of course, exemplify this kind of record in the 
way that they simultaneously document and resist interpersonal 
commonalities, presenting powerful evidence of race, gender, class, 
and place whose granularity of detail and richness of expression 
often cannot be comprehended through shallow and stereotypical 
interpretations. We are only beginning to realize the potential of 
home movies (and I extend this to personally generated records 
of all kinds) to challenge not only existing historiographies but 
existing dramaturgies as well, and I believe home movies offer one 
key to rendering the excesses of narrativization obsolete.
I think the covert function of an archive is to make things 
more complex, to complicate, to serve as a counterbal-
ance to the reductive and endlessly repeated soundbites 
that constitute much of what we are told is “history.” 
(Darms 2015)
No one is likely to halt the trend toward narrativizing evidence. 29
At its simplest it is like sorting eggs, and this renders it likely that 
wholesale narrativization will be done by machines on the fly, in the 
same way that Storify builds a thin narrative crust out of a tweet-
stream or low- budget news services draft bots to write stories. And 
there will obviously be fancier tools, some of them that may gain 
credence as default means to touch or to construct windows into 
archival content. Facebook’s Timeline is a narrativizing spine whose 
genius lay in its merging our personally authored words and im-
ages with the record of what we watched, listened to, and bought. 
Like the devotees who compiled a complete bibliography of every 
book on Bertolt Brecht’s shelves (Wizisla, Streidt, and Loeper 2007), 
Facebook recognized that our biographies were as much about 
what we consumed as what we produced.
twitter, you’re a kaleidoscopic cacophony of fragmentary, illusive  
and momentary information, serving up rumors, fears & wishes 
#Ferguson
— @footage, 2014–0 8– 16
And yet let me rehearse a half-h earted argument in favor of sto-
rytelling. It is urgent to preserve and disseminate the histories of 
today’s civil rights movement. The greatness of these histories lives 
in the nature of their creators—g rassroots activists, community 
members, lay witnesses to historical moments—a nd in their gran-
ularity. These histories are principally built of tiny pieces circulated 
through social media: Tweets, Instagrams, Periscope videos of 
greater or lesser persistence, calls and responses on Facebook. 
The assembly of these fragments forms a history that is as difficult 
to make sense of as it is to read a photograph from its halftone 
dots. Evidence collides with evidence, generating tangles that 
might never be unraveled. Here might be a place for some kind of 
storytelling beyond mere chronology. But if we assume that we can 
at least display some of this material, how do we make it mean-
ingful? How can we respect the evidence without strangling it in 
narrative, while making some sense of it without privileging a single 
30 or oversimplified interpretation? This is the single biggest problem 
we encounter when we select individual archival documents for 
display— we end up privileging specific narratives, putting answers 
before questions.
These materials are often sensitive, and their free use may be 
restricted by terms of service, copyright restrictions, and concerns 
for the privacy and legal vulnerability of the people who made 
social media posts or appeared in someone’s photos. They may 
therefore be likely to be restricted to in-h ouse use in a brick-a nd- 
mortar archives or museum, just as Library of Congress’s Twitter 
archives, if ever made ready for public display, will be kept offline. 
In this respect, the new digital archives will tend to resemble the 
old physical ones. They will propagate only over the Net when 
people quote what they read or photograph what they see on the 
walls. But the reason for making archives of these materials is to 
construct bridges rather than walls. This argues for accessibility, 
especially if we are to be hospitable to nontraditional archives 
users. In recent years we have collectively developed a big box 
of accessibility tools—d ata visualization and mapping platforms 
that are accessible to anyone with the computer literacy of the 
average gamer— and perhaps we can use these tools to narrativize 
evidence without losing its power along the way. Or, perhaps, to 
use the occasion of a museum visit to explain how storytelling can 
be a tool to expand and contract consciousness alike.
The historical interest of a work is inversely proportional to number of 
gatekeepers it passes thru. Books vs ephemera; TV vs home movies
— @footage, 2016–0 4– 27
Personal	Records	and	Vernacular	Collecting
Erika Mijlin: we regard excessive production of data w. celebration & 
awe, quite unlike way we regard other waste #poeticsandpolitics2015
— (@footage, 2015–0 5– 17)24
Hoarding can express distress & confusion, but also a need for 31
rootedness & security. This is something for #archives to consider. 
#mac16
— @footage, 2016–0 4– 30
Mars’s First Hundred settlers in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilo-
gy discover how to extend the human lifespan by several hundred 
years but are unable to get as keen a grip on the bioscience of 
memory preservation. Drawn to remediate their amnesia about 
events that happened over a century earlier, they frequently search 
databases to prompt their fading memories. Interestingly, almost 
all the searches target personal rather than institutional records. 
From this, and from today’s social media–c entered Internet, I am 
tempted to imagine the characteristics of future database queries. 
It seems quite possible that repositories of personal records and 
the microhistories associated with individual lives will become far 
more pertinent to the needs of future searchers than the records 
of government and institutions—e specially if surveillance databas-
es are considered as repositories of personal records.
In any case, there’s no question that the volume of personal media 
production is historically offscale. In such an environment it’s really 
hard to distinguish the archival from the contemporary. Residual 
and emergent, prolepsis and analepsis, not just coexisting but 
combining and reframing. Think of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, 
Snapchat, even the sadly languishing Flickr, all pseudo-a rchives 
that have supported quotation and reframing almost from their 
beginnings. The majority of personal media production occurs 
within these constantly refreshed workspaces that share common 
objects with custodial services that pretend to be archives but 
whose archival compact with users, as I’ve said elsewhere, is a 
noncommittal handshake (Prelinger 2015). We think we are saving 
our videos, photos, and posts, but we’re betting in a game where 
the house holds an insurmountable advantage. Does the trauma 
of archival erasure extend across the full spectrum of loss from 
the destruction of a whole society’s records to the closedown 
32 of a social media service and the concomitant loss of personal 
materials? We will unfortunately have the opportunity to ask this 
again and again.
Personal records have always been intimidatingly infinite relative 
to the societies that create them. Personal digital materials 
don’t represent a new challenge but rather inhabit a spectrum 
of personal recordkeeping that begins in the deep analog era: 
scratches in the sand, drawings on cave walls, clay tablets, papyrus 
fragments, graffiti, and so on; extending to quilts, diaries, letters, 
and postcards; then home movies and home video; into contempo-
rary digital media, and finally toward digital and postdigital media 
we are now seeing and might or might not expect in the future— 
body cams (Google Glass was only a first effort), location data and 
metadata from phones, et cetera; CCTV feeds; human metrics, such 
as the Quantified Selfists collect; endoscopy; sonograms; medical 
telemetry and, maybe sooner than we think, brain waves. Almost 
all of these “platforms” gave rise to an abundant record in their 
time; each posed preservation problems; and long-t erm survival of 
the record was rarely an issue.
Personal records are highly granular, typically uncharismatic, 
eminently unselectable, frequently unreleasable, effectively infinite, 
extremely inconvenient. Who owns today’s personal records? Who 
maintains them? Who forgets me; how can I be forgotten? There is 
complex, covert mirroring between records that exist part in open 
and part in classified worlds, giving rise to the jokes that NSA is our 
most reliable backup service. The lack of consistency in the way we 
regard our personal privacy adds to the confusion. It is remarkable 
how much people are willing to reveal publicly or semipublicly, 
to “friends.” I have speculated that many people are less worried 
about the original, granular data we spin off as a function of living 
in networked culture than they are about others transforming 
it into ordered timelines or narratives. Unsorted, unmodulated 
evidence may feel less sensitive than coherent stories others build 
and attach to our identities.25
Archivists sometimes express fatalism at personal digital archives 33
conferences. Questions turn into imponderables, and in general 
archivists (at least those who tweet their thoughts) are loath to 
invade personal privacy. Consequently they often revert to tool 
building because the big issues are profoundly complex and the 
mass of data unknowable to civilians. For a time it may feel safer to 
make analysis and processing tools and experiment on controllable 
datasets. But in my most optimistic moments, I think the weight of 
the quotidian record lifts away when we stop fussing and actually 
engage with it. The flour, oil, and salt some of us store against the 
prospect of apocalyptic starvation is easier to refresh when it is 
regularly drawn from. We will have to somehow make it safe to 
play with secrets, no matter how difficult the rules of that game 
may be.
I’d be curious to hear from anyone who’s written or thought about 
#archival activity as a practice resembling #permaculture
— @footage, 2012–1 0– 14
Access to personal records is one issue; long-t erm, infinite- 
capacity, robust, and sustainable storage another. Recent research 
proposing DNA as such a solution (Bornholt, Lopez, Carmean, 
Ceze, Seelig, and Strauss 2016) has piqued the archival imagina-
tion; some archivists wanting to believe that data precarity has 
been fixed, others clinging to risk eternal. I represent the latter 
category. What might infinite storage mean? The possibility of 
infinite storage actually invokes all sorts of fascinating problems 
of abundance. Infinite storage depreciates the value of individual 
records. Infinite warehouses make it easier to lose individual 
pallets. Infinite repositories of memory will enable forgetting on an 
unprecedented scale. Even the prospect of infinite digital storage 
revalidates the beleaguered physical artifact. Infinite storage will 
revivify old-s chool, artisanal- style curation. The paradox of infinite 
storage is that it will finally convince many of us not to hoard, 
because when loss is no longer a possibility, surviving records lose 
their privilege.
34 Nontransparent societies (most societies, other than perhaps Scan-
dinavian) are unlikely to resolve the question of access to personal 
records. Archives whose chief raison d’être is to preserve nonstate 
historical and cultural records seek to be open (however the cul-
tural meaning of “openness” may shift in time and place), and they 
wish to serve needs that do not explicitly facilitate surveillance and 
control. But for the moment it is impossible to provide the same 
kind of access to records with sensitive personal characteristics as 
to public and institutional records (especially government records 
that have been released or are statutorily open), and therefore per-
sonal records tend to be held under conditions that replicate the 
traditional inaccessibility of most archival collections. We are seeing 
this today with records of social movements, such as Occupy and 
Black Lives Matter. Most would agree that preserving these records 
is an imperative, but when we look more closely at their content 
and realize the legal and personal vulnerabilities of identifiable 
participants in these movements, our reservations grow.
There are other important reasons to keep many records quiet 
or private. Much traditional knowledge and traditional cultural 
expression is not intended for sharing outside the community 
or society in which it was created, and often not meant to be 
shared between all community members. To expose and disperse 
knowledge with ceremonial or spiritual significance can be an act 
of cultural aggression that perpetuates the history of wars against 
Aboriginal, Indigenous, and Native peoples. Many established re-
positories hold and expose records whose public visibility offends 
and endangers traditional communities. “Open access for all, to all” 
cannot be a culturally universal call.26
The paradox, then, is that much of what we must collect must also 
remain silent. Emerging repositories of personal and community 
records may inhabit vaults with virtual time clocks corresponding 
to every person represented in the archives, each ticking toward 
its own unlocking date. Is this really a situation to avoid?—w e 
might ask. At the very least, it is ironic. The advent of ubiquitous 
networked digital cultures has forced many cultural and historical 
archives to rethink the restrictions they have traditionally placed 35
on access to their holdings. The Internet’s ascendancy has also 
drowned us with senses of entitlement and possibility, allowing us 
to imagine that, yes, we can in fact collect the traces of all of our 
lives. But some of the new collections that can dive deep into our 
individual and community’s histories and intentions may for now 
be too inconvenient to be freely shared.
I could not forget, in an age of space-s hips, world wars & 
publicity, that the real things of the country were hidden 
& inward. (Brooks 1961)
Amateurism
I’m interested in why we don’t refer to “personal analog/physical 
archiving” but say “collecting” in most cases. #pda12
— @footage, 2012–0 2– 24
Vernacular archival practices by ordinary people are more persistent 
than standards and workflows of professional archivists. #archives
—@ footage, 2012–0 2– 25
Media archaeologists and anxious industry executives share at 
least one attribute, and that’s a special concern for media technol-
ogies and practices that originate at the periphery of established 
media industries. Both keenly track the challenges these may pose 
to dominant platforms. In so doing they peek into a future when 
suits and brand names may no longer receive the respect to which 
they’ve been accustomed. Archives are equally challenged by 
vernacular efforts to collect, manage, and preserve the historical 
record, and only the most courageous archivists have looked into 
the future and recognized uncoordinated decentralization as 
positive. Distributed collecting does raise complicated questions: 
it seems likely to me that the archival future will be much more 
about the coordination of a mass of collecting efforts than about 
the niceties of selection and appraisal; what future digital archivists 
are able to save will result from billions of lucky accidents, and one 
36 of their jobs will be to share knowledge of what data persists and 
keep track of evolving idiosyncratic recordkeeping models.
Popular archival practice doesn’t get as much attention as the 
latest viral video, but it’s excitingly disruptive. Personal, indepen-
dent, and community collections enable research and access in 
ways that more traditionally organized institutions cannot. They 
may not be nearly as organized or comprehensive, but they are 
often more direct and efficient. They may not present our materials 
on lovingly contextualized and vetted websites but can often 
shovel a lot of material online to surprise and enrich their users. 
Nontraditional entities can often be better at collecting specialized 
materials (nontextual, for instance) that can be vexing to tradi-
tional collections. And by defamiliarizing the compartmentation 
and seemingly mysterious workflows that exist in most special 
collections, independent collections encourage users and archivists 
to imagine about how future libraries and archives might work. Of 
all entities we might call “archival,” independent, community and 
amateur collections come closest to actionable spaces, possessing 
all the virtues, and of course the flaws, of amateurism.
For a younger generation of feminists, the archive is not 
necessarily either a destination or an impenetrable barri-
er to be breached, but rather a site and a practice integral 
to knowledge making, cultural production, and activism. 
The archive is where academic and activist work frequent-
ly converge. . . . Rather than a destination for knowledges 
already produced or a place to recover histories and ideas 
placed under erasure, the making of archives is frequently 
where knowledge production begins. (Eichhorn 2013, 3)27
Perhaps the firehose of personal records requires centralized insti-
tutions that can collect at scale. But already individuals and nonpro-
fessionalized groups are often the first responders and sometimes 
the most assiduous preservers of personal (and certain impersonal, 
depending upon their focus) digital materials. If true, we are head-
ing into a delightfully kaleidoscopic period of archival practices, a 
panorama of outsider collections whose allure will radiate from the 37
methods by which they were collected and organized, rather than 
by what they may contain. But while this prospect may be enabled 
by the digital turn, we do not owe its conception to digitality.
The historian Robert C. Binkley promoted amateur scholarship and 
collecting before his untimely death in 1940 (see Binkley 2016). 
He characterized amateur historians, collectors, and independent 
scholars as a kind of citizen research force whose self-m otivated 
efforts (or organized efforts through such agencies as the U.S. 
Works Progress Administration) could fill gaps in scholarship and 
collecting unaddressed by established libraries, archives, and 
universities. Long before E. P. Thompson popularized the phrase 
“history from below,” Binkley addressed the work the academy 
was leaving undone. In several inspiring essays, replete with 
suggestions and scenarios we still might consider implementing, 
he imagined a kind of distributed research and publishing system 
that opened participation in scholarship to amateurs, the uncre-
dentialed, and the unemployed, a system that made use of new 
reproduction techniques like micropublishing, offset printing, and 
strike- on typesetting. He promoted (and may have conceived) the 
WPA program for unemployed intellectuals in Ohio, a public works 
innovation employing them to inventory local history collections 
and index historical newspapers. A close reading of his Manual 
on Methods of Reproducing Research Materials (1936), packed with 
fascinating descriptions of now-e xtinct technologies that will de-
light today’s media archaeologists, reveals little foreknowledge of 
electronics but much anticipation of the attributes of the Internet 
as a system for scholarly communication, and the turn toward 
digital humanities.28
Archives	of	Inconvenience
Those talks on archival materials that conclude sanctimoniously, but 
worst of all *boringly,* that “archives matter”:
— @ncecire, 2015–0 2– 2829
38 If all you can get out of your archival materials is that they matter, 
then they do not in fact matter.
— @ncecire, 2015–0 2– 28
Archival enclosure is a systemic problem and nonproductive 
inconvenience. But other inconveniences can be formative. 
Wrangling with inconvenience is like choosing to write by hand 
instead of typing or dictating; you learn more about the words you 
are processing (see Mueller and Oppenheimer 2014). My urban 
history film events have been made possible in part through the 
productive inconveniences of physical media. Archival film is often 
inconvenient to work with and difficult to see; it takes time, labor, 
and resources to inspect, repair, document, prep for scanning, 
scan, edit, and so forth. Workflow can, however, be exploited to 
bring other interested parties into the production process: it can 
involve community members, creators and their relatives, and 
possibly even motivated scholars. In the same way a gem cutter 
spends time closely examining the uncut stone, engagement with 
the physical constituents of a film brings the maker(s) into a closer 
relationship with the possibilities the film might express.
Inconvenience enables defamiliarization, which is what makes 
movies (and, in fact, all representation) possible. Inconvenience 
defamiliarizes not only the deceptive ease of interfacing but 
foregrounds the problematics of our relationships to interfaces as 
well as the information that lies behind them. Just as engagement 
with digital media helps us better understand analog affordances, 
engagement with digital inconvenience will allow us in time to 
negotiate clearer terms with the digital turn. Rather than trying to 
efface the inconvenient attributes of archives, it is time to celebrate 
and make our peace with them.
But while welcoming archival inconvenience, we cannot overlook 
archival precarity. Most cultural repositories lack strong advocates, 
and we must step in to help defend their independence and ensure 
their persistence. We must find a way to thematize archives simul-
taneously in two realms: as players in unpredictably evolving media 
ecosystems, and as entities that stand apart from the voracious 39
present and offer at least a fair shot at historical accountability. 
One plausible strategy for scholars and artists might be to engage 
rather than outsource: to emulate the labor of entomologists, 
folklorists, and field recorders, many of whom collect their own 
research material rather than relying on others to supply it. Placing 
archival practice at the core of our own work permits us to join 
with archivists in determining the evolution of recordkeeping. The 
decentralization (and reengineering) of archival practice should not 
just be the mission of archives but of their users and supporters as 
well. The active critique of archival practice cannot prevent us from 
engaging with archives in all of their imperfection and working 
to bridge the gaps that have separated repositories from users, 
theorists, and the public.
What archives offer the contemporary mediasphere—p erhaps their 
primary affordance— is the possibility of foregrounding evidence 
over interpretation and overnarrativization. Whether through 
physical media, performance, presence, social practice, or digital 
technologies, new means of evidence-b ased cultural intervention 
will continue to arise. And yet I’m not sure we’re well served by an 
excess of affordances. Look at Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, 
lost in the nineteenth-c entury supermarket of ideas, and their 
homebuilt laboratory filled with equipment used once to perform 
inconclusive experiments. Or their New England equivalent, the Pe-
terkin family as chronicled in The Peterkin Papers (which I interpret 
as a satire on the Transcendentalists), who, in one story, go to great 
effort to source for their son Solomon John the paper, ink, and 
quills he needs for the book he so much wants to write, and then, 
when he sits down at his desk surrounded by family members he 
looks up and states, “But I haven’t got anything to say!” (Hale 1868).
“Alas! and woe is me!” thus bemoaned himself a heavy- 
looking gentleman in green spectacles. “The world is 
utterly ruined, and there is nothing to live for any longer. 
The business of my life is snatched from me. Not a vol-
ume to be had for love or money!” . . . 
40 “My dear sir,” said I to the desperate bookworm, “is 
not nature better than a book? Is not the human heart 
deeper than any system of philosophy? Is not life replete 
with more instruction than past observers have found it 
possible to write down in maxims? Be of good cheer. The 
great book of Time is still spread wide open before us; 
and, if we read it aright, it will be to us a volume of eternal 
truth.”
“O, my books, my books, my precious printed books!” 
reiterated the forlorn bookworm.
“My only reality was a bound volume; and now they 
will not leave me even a shadowy pamphlet!”
In fact, the last remnant of the literature of all the ages 
was now descending upon the blazing heap in the shape 
of a cloud of pamphlets from the press of the New World. 
These likewise were consumed in the twinkling of an eye, 
leaving the earth, for the first time since the days of Cad-
mus, free from the plague of letters,—a n enviable field for 
the authors of the next generation. . . . 
“Well, and does anything remain to be done?” inquired 
I, somewhat anxiously. “Unless we set fire to the earth 
itself, and then leap boldly off into infinite space, I know 
not that we can carry reform to any farther point.” (Na-
thaniel Hawthorne, “Earth’s Holocaust”)
Notes
The point of departure for this chapter is the keynote talk the author delivered 
at the Terms of Media II Actions conference at Brown University on October 8, 
2015, but this text is heavily revised and extended.
 1 @footage is the author. All textual extracts in this chapter credited to a Twitter 
handle are verbatim Tweets.
 2 Bethany Nowviskie (2016a and b) calls for the reformulation of digital collec-
tions and digital scholarship “to fuel the conceptualization and the realization 
of alternative futures,” invoking Afrofuturist thought and the fusion of commu-
nity archival practice with speculative thinking, as exemplified in the work of 
Rasheedah Phillips’s Community Futures Lab. (https://www.blackquantumfutur 
ism.com/, accessed April 15, 2017.).
 3 Jarrett M. Drake (2016a and b) critiques “the traditional way of doing archives,” 41
outlines the risks of reformism and describes “the transformative power of 
liberatory and community archives” in an essential, two-p art article.
 4 Michelle Caswell’s essential paper (2016) describes the “failure of interdisciplin-
arity” between humanities scholarship and archival studies.
 5 Tansey (2016) describes the “marginalization from the public sphere” that 
affects archivists, despite their essential role in maintaining the historical and 
cultural record.
 6 As far as I can determine, Jessa Lingel (2016) was the first writer to explicitly 
link “the fetish of the archive” with the unwillingness of outsiders to recognize 
archival labor. Archivist Hillel Arnold (2016) suggests that maintenance studies 
is a framework for understanding archivists’ marginalization and invisibility.
 7 Greene and Meissner (2005) examined and critiqued the ritualistic nature of 
textual archival processing in a paper that remains controversial ten years after 
its publication.
 8 @bspalmieri is Brooke S. Palmieri.
 9 Drake (2016a) names and eloquently critiques three characteristics of tradition-
al archives, comparing them to the carceral vision embodied in Philadelphia’s 
Eastern State Penitentiary, opened 1829: “silence, solitude and surveillance.”
10. Consideration of analogies and relationships between knowledge and informa-
tion infrastructures and infrastructures of cities populates the work of scholar 
Shannon Mattern (2016).
11 The effects of this tragedy are still seen today in the Draconian fire codes 
governing storage of nitrate film (Greene and Newell 1929).
12 For years nitrate decomposition was believed to increase the danger of com-
bustibility, until Heather Heckman’s (2010) literature survey established that 
this relationship was based more on faith than on research..
13 A stellar assembly of archivists, scholars, and devotees have contributed to 
such a project: cf. Smither and Surowiec (2002).
14 For an exhaustive and well-r esearched survey of silent feature film survival, see 
Pierce 2013.
15 An entertaining compilation of studio-p roduced stock footage and process 
plates may be seen at https://archive.org/details/InternetArchive35mmStock-
FootageSampleReel (accessed July 1, 2018).
16 “Poems are considered frivolous, but they have jobs to do. They offer up space 
to make sense of not just language, but being.” Jen Bervin, speaking at the 
Creative Capital Artist Retreat, Williams College, 2013, at https://aroomof 
teresasown.wordpress.com/2014/10/14/quote-of-the-day-jen-bervin/,  
accessed August 25, 2016.
17 See Schiller and Prelinger 2017.
18 A visit to a nontraditional library resensitized Kevin Kelly, a longtime advocate 
of digitality, to books and their affordances. See Kelly 2011.
19 See Soar and Gallant 2016.
20 @john_overholt is John Overholt. @mchris4duke is Chris Bourg.
21 @snowdenbecker is Snowden Becker.
42 22 See Leary 2011.
23 As of mid-2 018, I have produced 24 film/events of this type, which have been 
presented before 100 live audiences. See Schiller and Prelinger 2017.
24 Paraphrasing Erika Mijlin’s remarks at the Poetics and Politics Documentary 
Research Symposium, U.C. Santa Cruz, May 17, 2015. Mijlin’s sentiment hints 
at the hierarchies and moral panics linked with differing domains of collecting. 
The moral panics and pathologies that generally surround hoarding should 
not deter archivists from thinking seriously about what it can teach them. 
Scott Herring (2014) examines the socially devaluated and highly pathologized 
practice of hoarding in his thoughtful and courageous book, which is also an 
examination of vernacular archival practice on another level and a book I highly 
recommend to archivists and archival scholars. Many people who are seen as 
hoarders (including Andy Warhol, who assembled more than six hundred of 
his “time capsules”) may well be working toward some of the same objectives 
archives are organized to address. Anna Chen (2015) encourages archivists to 
consider “digital hoarding” and “individual organizational practices” as organic 
activities that may usefully inform archival practices.
25 Akin, perhaps, to the escalation in citation of the “mosaic theory” by U.S. fed-
eral agencies as grounds for exempting information from public release under 
the Freedom of Information Act. See Pozen 2005.
26 Scholar Kimberly Christen (2012 and 2018) has collaborated with Indigenous 
communities to develop archival management systems and platforms for 
managing their curatorial and archival needs. Critiquing generalized calls for 
“openness,” she advocates the incorporation of “a wider range of ethical and 
cultural concerns into our digital tools.”
27 By quoting Eichhorn as part of a discussion of amateurism, I do not mean to 
imply that she privileges personal and community collecting over institutional 
collecting. “For a generation or two of women born during and following the 
rise of the second wave feminist movement, inaugurating private and semipub-
lic collections as archives and donating them to established public and univer-
sity archives and collections is central to how they legitimize their voices in the 
public sphere” (Eichhorn 2013, 15).
28 The book contains tipped-i n and glued-i n photographs, microfilm and micro-
print samples, printing plates, mimeographed sheets and newsprint, all of 
which resist conventional mass-d igitization processes. See Binkley 1936.
29 @ncecire is Natalia Cecire.
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