Archive of technology, entertainment and everyday life
A reading of automotive preservation as a cultural practice: vehicles, engines, chassis and manuals, together with their social contexts, explain far more than technical evolution.
Open storyMuseum archives show that conservation is not simply about storing objects. Drawing on institutional cases and resources from Spain and Latin America, this article examines how documents, photographs, moving images and electronic technologies support research, access and cultural memory.
Open storyBetween 1970 and 2009, restoration in Spanish museums can be read as a shift from poorly documented interventions towards coordinated projects combining historical research, conservation, the recovery of interiors and renewed museum displays. The Prado, Museo Cerralbo, MAN and National Library make it possible to trace that change without reducing it to a merely technical timeline.
Open storyThe planned new Film Museum in the former NO-DO building offers a way to reconsider what preserving film heritage means: not merely safeguarding copies, but also caring for media, documentation, cultural uses and the conditions of access that make audiovisual history intelligible.
Open storyTechnology can broaden access to collections, support their documentation and reduce handling of some originals. Yet an isolated image or record does not, by itself, preserve an object’s history. This analysis explains why inventories, identifiers and contextual metadata are essential parts of cultural preservation.
Open storyMuseum archives are not merely administrative back-up. Institutional records, photographs, and collections linked to communities make it possible to study how the memory of everyday life is constructed, preserved, and interpreted—provided their limits and production contexts are taken into account.
Open storyThe institutional evidence available shows that conservation and restoration are not limited to repairing objects: they depend on reports, inventories, protocols and traceable decisions. A look at the Prado, the MNCN and Spanish public documentation to understand why the record of an intervention becomes part of the object itself.
Open storyComics and comic magazines were created as widely circulated, inexpensive, and vulnerable printed matter. The available documentation shows how archives, museums, digital projects, and collectors have helped reconsider them as cultural sources whose preservation requires context, description, and access—not storage alone.
Open storyPreserving a console as an isolated object says little about its cultural life. Drawing on museum and archival principles, this analysis proposes viewing the console, its documentation, context, and public access as an inseparable whole, without assigning a specific model a history not documented by the available evidence.
Open storyAn editorial guide to approaching an arcade machine through documentation and preventive conservation: identify what is known, record its condition and context, and separate verifiable data from memories.
Open storyBetween 1970 and 2009, several Spanish institutional examples reveal a decisive shift: restoration ceased to be understood only as an intervention on an object and increasingly required documentation, professional coordination, and a historical reading of spaces.
Open storyA guide to understanding the computer as a museum-documentation tool: not as a replacement for objects, but as a means of linking provenance, conservation condition, images, movements and institutional history.
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