Quotes About Archives

The folding or doubling is itself a Memory: the 'absolute memory' or the memory of the outside, beyond the brief memory inscribed in strata and archives, beyond the relics remaining in the diagrams.

Sergey Radchenko and David Wolff, 'To the Summit via Proxy-Summits: New Evidence from Soviet and Chinese Archives on Mao's Long March to Moscow, 1949', Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Issue 16 (Fall 2007/Winter 2008), p. 106.

I have 800 books of just Samuel Beckett's work, tons of his correspondence, personal letters that he wrote. I have copies of plays he used when he directed, so all of his handwritten notes are in the corners of the page.

The history of our time must be well-captured and documented.

The staff played hot potato with my call until someone could locate the Person in Charge of Lying to the Press. The PCLP said that the room that houses the base archives is locked. And that only the curator would have a key. And that Holloman currently has no curator. Evidently the new curator's first task would be to find a way to open the archives.

Hypersecrecy became an unquenchable thirst that strengthened Stalin's grip. Out of the business directorate he and his functionaries carved out a separate entity named the "secret department," which took charge of denunciations and investigations, the party archives, and the contacts with the secret police.

Every exchange between reporters and officials is important - that's why every State press briefing is put into the archives.

The Carnegie Foundation is well aware of the fact that their reports frequently find their way to dusty archives in academic institutions, but occasionally people pick up a segment of a report and act upon it.

As historians, we spend days in archives, gazing at account books. We train would-be historians in the arts of deciphering letters and documents, early Latin, scribal handwriting, medieval French.

Het Smolensk-archief heeft duidelijk gemaakt in welke mate elk onderzoek van deze periode uit de Russische geschiedenis blijvend gehinderd zal worden door het ontbreken van de meest elementaire documenten en statistieken. [...]Kortom, we leren niets uit de organisatiestructuur van het regime, terwijl we daar in het geval van nazi-Duitsland zeer goed over geïnformeerd zijn.

Old reference books are like tree rings. Without them, there'd be no way to know what a tree had lived through.

Ideology must be our foundation as it was for the Bolsheviks, but the new archives show that the personalities and patronage of a minuscule oligarchy were the essence of politics under Lenin and Stalin, as they were under the Romanov emperors—and just as they are today under the 'managed democracy' of twenty-first-century Russia.

scripts: his archive reveals how he even helped write the songs.

When I took the job as Estée Lauder's creative director, the first thing I did was go into the archives! I love taking our heritage and making it modern.

Research promoted by NARA within a major coalition of Federal and private sector research partners has at last demonstrated that an Electronic Records Archives can be built.

I like historical things; I like researching things.

All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulation: that is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings.

Do you really think anyone saves our programs from one year to the next?" Sarah asked. "My mother does," Daisy said. "So does mine," Sarah answered, "but it's not as if she pulls them out and compares them side by side." "My mother does," Daisy said again. "Dear God," Iris moaned.

But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole.

When asked why he wrote the book, Freed said: In the 1980s, I joined the small group of anthropologists who were writing about the history of their subject. I believed that I could add some balance to American anthropological history, and that the best place to start was with museums— where the story began. The more I delved into the archives, the more I was fascinated. I was hooked.

There's nothing more sobering than a thirty year old newspaper.

I remember 'The Norfolk Journal and Guide,' which is a black newspaper that still exists, but it was really influential, as you can imagine, in the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties. But all of their archives are online and digitized, and it was a really great resource.

I have certainly amassed many historical research gathering skills.

Most archivists don't like surprises. That's why we work in the past.