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"Digital archives are often seen as a democratised solution to the issues raised by the role of the host institution and its selection processes, and by the paradox of wanting to keep everything yet the impracticality of doing so. What will the sheer volume of material mean for researchers in the future, especially if it is decontextualised and without external authentication (as is the case of the fictitious archive of Naomi V. Jelish)? Keeping everything is not a solution: as Ben Highmore wrote recently of the Mass-Observation archive, ‘by inviting everyone to become the author of their own life, by letting everyone speak about everything, the vast archive of documents became literally unmanageable’.20 The internet suggests permanence by using terms such as ‘autoarchiving’, but this is an illusion. The material needs to be actively captured and preserved. Archives that survive must inevitably be kept in some kind of houses of memory, whether real or virtual. The act of remembering involves both storing and retrieving: it is not a passive process, especially in the digital age. To be able to confirm the original context and provenance of archives will become more important than ever.

In the increasingly overlapping environments of creation, curation and consumption of archives, I should like to see new, fertile readings of the relationship between archivist, artist and researcher. Where boundaries are less defined, information and practices must and should be exchanged. Just as archivists engage with the meaning and implications of their activities, as well as the needs and interests of their researchers, so the theoretical discussion of the archive should properly understand its practices and historiography."