Contemporary
The archive is part of technology’s history too
A look at how archives connected with science and technology museums help preserve and share documentation, and at the questions to ask before using it to reconstruct a device’s history.
Everyday technology that transformed our routines
Latest additions
2000s
An automobile museum can also be read through its documents
The Museo de Historia de la Automoción de Salamanca offers an opportunity to distinguish what a vehicle preserves as an object from what its documents can help explain. The available sources confirm an archive associated with the museum, but do not detail its individual records here—a distinction that matters both for research and display.
1990s
A console defined by licensable specifications
The 3DO case illustrates an unusual industrial-design and business decision: offering hardware specifications that third parties could license instead of limiting manufacture to one company. The available documentation also makes clear where claims about that strategy must stop.
2000s
Photography and video: what archives can help us distinguish
A cautious approach to visual culture from 1970 to 2009: separating what an image shows from what its medium, process and documentation allow us to claim.
2000s
The computer didn’t end at the case: drive, medium and record
To understand how a home computer was used, it helps to look beyond the machine: its peripherals and storage media also had to be identified, preserved and described. Archival documentation offers clues about this relationship—and about what cannot be inferred from a storage medium alone.
2000s
Before Saving the Image, Read What Its Support Can Tell Us
A photograph documents more than what it depicts. Its support, process and surviving annotations can help describe it, but they do not justify filling in what is missing. A guide to the clues and limits of documentary reading, from developed paper to digital workflows.
Contemporary
A museum vehicle can also be read through its documents
An engine, a chassis and a manual tell different parts of the story of car culture. The available sources help clarify what can be said about that reading—and what still needs verification.
Contemporary
Everyday life never fits entirely in a display case
Archives and museums can bring everyday practices into view, but the documents and objects they preserve are partial evidence: they illuminate specific contexts, not a universal experience.
Contemporary
Museum graphics also guide the eye
Signs, labels and catalogues are not merely decoration added to an exhibition: they organise information and suggest ways of moving through it. Archives make this work available for study, though they do not always reveal how it was used.
Contemporary
A Device Cannot Tell Its Own Story of Use
Archives in science and technology museums make it possible to study the records that accompany objects. Manuals, registers and other documents can help distinguish what a device promised from what its use allows us to claim—provided the limits of each source are acknowledged.
2000s
A Floppy Disk Was Also a Document: Describing What It Held
Archival and cataloguing standards show that removable media cannot be understood by its physical form alone: the storage unit, its contents and their description also matter. What these sources do—and do not—allow us to say about home-computer use.
Contemporary
A Radio Recording Is Also a Document
Sound archives and studies of radio make it possible to distinguish recorded music from the documents that preserve and contextualize it. The available evidence opens up a line of inquiry, but cannot by itself reconstruct a listening scene.
