Archive of technology, entertainment and everyday life
A guide to working with catalogues, photo archives, periodicals, and academic studies when reconstructing everyday practices. It starts from available evidence on Mexico, Spain, and Ibero-American archives, distinguishing what a source documents from what it only permits as a hypothesis.
Open storyOn 6 December 2006, the creation of Mexico City’s Museo Archivo de la Fotografía was published. Drawing on the available institutional information, this article places that milestone within a broader history: photography as a record of urban administration, the challenge of describing large holdings, and the role of museums and photo libraries in preserving visual memory.
Open storyA critical reading of the transformation attributed to board games from the 1990s onward: broader supply, the circulation of so-called Eurogames, and the continuing need for stronger sector documentation.
Open storySix sources make it possible to outline, with explicit limits, several landmarks in Spanish toy history: the electric train of 1931, the interruption caused by the Civil War, Scalextric’s presence from 1952, Nancy in 1968, Madelman in 1968, and Geyperman in 1975.
Open storyA critical timeline of two milestones in 1950s Japanese animation: Ryūichi Yokoyama’s home-based Otogi Productions and the 1956 founding of Tōei Dōga. It separates available facts from later interpretations.
Open storyA cautious chronological reading of the Olivetti Programma 101, presented in 1964: a programmable desktop machine that shows why labels such as “first personal computer” require nuance.
Open storyBetween 1944 and 2009, several sources document interventions at historic museums in Spain and Brazil affecting rooms, gardens, courtyards, circulation and public presentation. This timeline separates what the sources establish from interpretations about decoration, conservation and museum display.
Open storyA critical reading of the available evidence on the Museu del Còmic i la Il·lustració and the value of magazines, booklets, press material and original art as documentary heritage. The article separates what the sources support from what still requires cataloguing, provenance and institutional consultation.
Open storyFive verifiable points for understanding why a digital copy without identification, provenance and a relationship to the physical object may retain information while losing cultural meaning.
Open storyA critical reading of the role of archives, graphic design and advertising in building museum narratives: preservation alone is not enough; documentation, context and access also matter.
Open storyThe Historical Archive of the Puerto Cristal Museum in Chile holds records from the 1960s to the 1990s concerning a mining camp and the lives of its residents. It offers a way to explain why an archive is not a collection of isolated memories: it preserves provenance, activities, and links among the school, radio, port warehouses, laboratory, and mine, although the available evidence does not describe every record or its physical condition.
Open storyPhotographic and audiovisual archives do not preserve images alone: they also safeguard relationships, uses and descriptions. Drawing on documented cases from Spain and Mexico City, this article examines why preventive conservation, digitisation and metadata must work together.
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