I thought of them as catering to the specialized interests of their customers: small, selective, and only offering books that might sell and be taken away, with enough profit margin to keep the store in business. When I was in my 20’s living in Boston-before and before the World Wide Web (but during the early Internet)-new and used bookstores were everywhere. Let’s try another approach to understanding distinctions between bookstores, libraries and archives. Think of all the videotapes of lectures that are thrown out or were never recorded in the first place. Think of all the drafts of books that have disappeared once we started to write with word processors and kept the files on fragile computer floppies and disks. Archives play an important function that must be maintained-we give frightfully little attention to collections of unpublished works in the digital age. The traditional definition of a library is that it is made up of published materials, while an archive is made up of unpublished materials. For the moment, let’s take the concepts of Library and Archive.
These organizations and institutions have evolved with different success criteria, not just because of the shifting physical manifestation of knowledge over time, but because of the different roles each group plays in a functioning society. My evolving understanding of these different names might help focus a discussion that has become blurry in our digital times: the difference between the roles of publishers, bookstores, libraries, archives, and museums. The Internet Archive had long since grown out of being an “archive of the Internet”-a singular collection, say of web pages-to being “archives on the Internet,” plural. Back in 2006, I was honored to give a keynote at the meeting of the Society of American Archivists, when the president of the Society presented me with a framed blown-up letter “S.” This was an inside joke about the Internet Archive being named in the singular, Archive, rather than the plural Archives. Of course, he was right, as I should have known all along. See the original article here on ATG’s websiteīy: Brewster Kahle, Founder & Digital Librarian, Internet Archive
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