Quotes About Archives

It seems simple to define what a library is—namely, it is a storeroom of books.

I love archival films very much. I spent thousands of hours watching archive footage. Every time I see it, I see something. Sometimes I think I know this footage, but two years later, I see it again, and I see something new.

Social media might one day offer a dazzling, and even overwhelming, array of source material for historians.

The increasing legal pressure against archives has created anxieties among researchers, librarians, and journalists. They cite the need to protect sources who wish to make a record for posterity; procuring documents and interviews from those sources will be difficult if the fruits are only one subpoena away from disclosure.

Podemos apostar con total confianza que, en pocos años, los dibujos del señor G. se convertirán en archivos preciosos de la vida civilizada. Los curiosos buscarán sus obras tanto como las de los Debucourt, los Moreau, los Saint-Aubin, los Carle Vernet, los Lami, los Devéria, los Gavarni, y las de todos los artistas exquisitos que, pese a haber pintado solo lo familiar y lo bonito, a su manera no dejan de ser historiadores serios.

Weaver never published his ideas. His memorandum lay unnoticed in the archives of the foundation, now stored underground on one of the Rockefeller estates. And his dream of reworking photosynthesis would be almost forgotten for sixty years, until it was revived by the descendants of the molecular biologists whom Weaver had funded and the successor to Rockefeller as the world's biggest charitable foundation.

Somewhere in the archives of crudest instinct is recorded the truth that it is better to be endangered and free than captive and comfortable.

muniments room. Toodle-oo.

Es el hombre vivo lo que hay que buscar bajo el polvo de los archivos y en el silencio de los museos.

A library is thought in cold storage.

And of course there is so much of World War II that is documented that we never have seen

But that era is coming to an end. Remem is merely the first of a new generation of memory prostheses, and as these products gain widespread adoption, we will be replacing our malleable organic memories with perfect digital archives. We will have a record of what we actually did instead of stories that evolve over repeated tellings. Within our minds, each of us will be transformed from an oral culture into a literate one.

They are probably now either archived or expunged. If I don't escape from 1851 within the next three weeks, I will never know which.

For a fuller account of the revelations of the Moscow archives, and their detailed vindication of Orwell, see my Introduction to Orwell in Spain (Penguin, 2001).

The library is testimony to truth and to error

It was not a happy ending, but a happy middle - at last, after so many fraught beginnings. Their story would be long. Much would be written of them, some of it in verse, some sung, and some in plain prose, in volumes to be penned for the archives of cities not yet built.

The keepers of books had been the keepers of wisdom.

Five years ago the Library of Congress began a project that collects every utterance on Twitter, in the name of preserving the nation's digital heritage. That is billions weekly, sucked up for storage in secure tape archives, and the Library has yet to figure out how to make any of it available to researchers. Divorced from a human curator, the unfiltered mass of Twitter may as well be a garbage heap [What Libraries Can (Still) Do, The New York Review Daily, October 26, 2015].

NARA must provide security at our facilities to protect our public patrons, our staff, and our holdings.

T]he only place on earth where immortality is provided is in libraries. This is the collective memory of humanity.

It was eventually named "the sub-commission on the historical dimension to implement a dialogue with the aim to restore mutual confidence between the two nations, including an impartial scientific examination of the historical records and archives to define existing problems and formulate recommendations.

I have all of my firesuits and helmets, and my parents collect all the newspaper articles and pictures and stuff like that.

I'm so concerned with morgues and libraries of the newspapers.

I missed my entrance in a production of 'Blade to the Heat' at Thick Description in San Francisco. I came into the scene very late and hugged the punching bag. I had no idea what to do! Unfortunately, that mishap was recorded for archives at UC Berkeley. It goes down in history.