Archive of technology, entertainment and everyday life
Toy museums and collections make it possible to read a society’s childhood, industry and customs. This article examines what a toy can document and why preserving it means keeping the object connected to its provenance, use and context.
Open storyMuseums’ presence online widened access to collections, exhibitions, and documentation. Yet digitisation does not automatically equal preservation: copies, catalogue records, identifiers, and specialist interpretation are all part of an object’s meaning. A journey from early online museum publishing to today’s discussion of context.
Open storyDomestic cookbooks do more than pass on preparations: they can document habits, aesthetics and cultural memory. A museum-oriented reading must distinguish what an object proves from what it merely suggests.
Open storyA critical tour through the available evidence on board-game renewal from the 1970s onward: European design, the market transformation of the 1990s, and a constellation of titles including Master Mind, The Settlers of Catan, Jungle Speed, Dixit, and Dobble.
Open storySpanish stickers did not begin as a stand-alone product: they moved from accompanying goods to being sold in packs and arranged in albums. This account explains what changed in that transition, why swapping duplicates mattered, and where the available history has limits.
Open storyThe Museo Cerralbo recovery project shows that restoring a house museum is not merely a matter of repairing objects: it also means interpreting spaces, uses and historical ways of displaying a collection. This analysis separates documented facts from the questions that remain open.
Open storyThe creation of Mexico City’s Museum Archive of Photography in 2006 makes it possible to examine photography not only as an image, but as a document that must be organized, preserved, and made accessible. Its case is in dialogue with Spanish institutions that safeguard long-running photographic collections.
Open storyThe announcement of a Film Museum in the former NO-DO building opens a discussion that goes beyond displaying objects: how to preserve, contextualise and make audiovisual heritage accessible when its material form and historical meaning cannot be separated.
Open storyBetween 1944 and 2009, several documented interventions affected room decoration and other spaces at Madrid’s National Museum of Romanticism. This feature examines what can be stated about those phases and why historic decoration must be read through the building, display, and documentation together.
Open storyThe IBM PC 5150 was introduced on 12 August 1981. More than an isolated machine, it became a reference point for manufacturers that could adopt a similar architecture and use MS-DOS, helping the compatible-PC market expand.
Open storyA critical tour of six documented motor collections and museums shows that preserving a car or motorcycle is not only about displaying an object: it also means retaining manuals, tools, public uses, and stories of design and industry.
Open storyThe magazine was a decisive way to read comics in Spain: it gathered serial work, gave younger artists space, and reached the newsstand. Between the boom in adult-oriented titles from 1981 to 1990 and their sharp decline in the 1990s, albums and other formats changed that publishing ecology.
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