Quotes About Archives

I applied for funding to embark on an overseas field trip in Iceland, and spent six weeks there happily holed up in the national archives, museums and libraries, sifting through ministerial and parish records, censuses, maps, microfilm, logs, and local histories.

If you're reissuing something, it's important to have demos and everything else from that time that wasn't used.

History is obviously dependent on the evidence, and it's always amazing to me how much evidence there is.

People simply don't have room, physical room, to keep, for instance, 2-inch tape in the sort of quantities that are required to hold a full archive. It's not just a matter of having three or four boxes, it's 40, 90 boxes of 2-inch tape, and very few people have the resources that sort of stuff properly.

Well, I'm a tape-recording nut. I like to play my tapes.

I like shelves full of books in a library, but if all books become electronic, the task of big research libraries remains the same - keep what's published in the form in which it appeared.

Unless some long-lost trove of letters or ' a forgotten diary turns up, I believe that we probably .now know.all

thanks also to the Library of Virginia, the Library of Congress,

History was a patchwork of voids. The great university libraries and public archives had mostly rotted away or been used as fuel in the Dark Age. An entire generation's correspondence and memories had vanished into this mysterious entity the antiquarians called 'The Cloud'.

I am a student of history," she said at last, "a collector of old stories.

[The Library of Congress] is a multimedia encyclopedia. These are the tentacles of a nation.

Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race.

Caches of data are being recovered all the time. Why, just the other day, I heard that we now had complete texts for all three of Shakespire's plays!

now he was requesting as much microfilm as the librarians would let him have at one time, and was buzzing it all through the viewer with such speed that the machine was actually rocking on the table. (Several other researchers, with the frowns of elephants disturbed at their feeding, had gathered up their own materials and moved

Of the four men in Preston Prichard's cabin, D-90, only one survived, his friend Arthur Gadsden. Prichard's body was never recovered, yet in the red volume that now contains the beautifully archived replies to Mrs. Prichard's letters there exists a surprisingly vivid sense of him, as though he resided still in the peripheral vision of the world.

My travels took me as far north as Thorsminde, Denmark (in February no less); as far south as Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia; as far west as the Hoover Library at Stanford University; and to various points east, including the always amazing Library of Congress and the U.S. National Archives, and equally enticing archives in London, Liverpool, and Cambridge.

Hall withdrew the manuscript, though his notes and a number of completed chapters reside today in the Churchill Archives in Cambridge, England.

He was the archivist, and all the archives of the town were in his office. That has nothing to do with the story. Anyway

documentary records.

What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book - a key part of our planet's cultural legacy.

Some archives and record offices are housed in your local museum or library; others have their own stand-alone building. Wherever they are, they are a treasure trove.

I remembered that my grandfather had spent his teenage years in Shanghai and that he went back after he finished medical school to work there in a hospital. So I went back into my family archives and was able to find out his exact address; it was a street that was in the French Concession.

Earlier generations of biographers had to rely on only a meager portion of his voluminous output.

Or the Russians could have had some kind of tripwire in place. Something to alert them if anyone was close to finding whatever they wanted to keep hidden. They're not reckless. They'd know that one document sitting unnoticed amongst how many—thousands? millions?—in a dusty old archive would attract less attention than a fire.