1. This pair of thematic issues ofArchival Science (the current volume and its successor) is dedicated with affection to Hugh Taylor, the dean of Canadian archivists. The ideas it explores owe much to his reflections upon media, documentary meaning, technological transformations, the evolution from ancient and medieval orality and mnemonics (archivists as remembrancers) through to archives without walls in a wired networked world, for purposes possibly good (his own bioregional, ecological, spiritual thrusts for the archival memory endeavour) or possibly ill (a mega-worldwide electronic corporate powerbase that could make the controlling exploitation of humans in the industrial revolution look modest in comparison). In his challenges to archival traditions, practices, and conventions, penned from the late 1960s to the mid 1990s, lay the germs of the editors' postmodernist sensibilities.
2. Maurice Halbwachs,On Collective Memory, Lewis A. Coser (ed. and trans.), (Chicago, 1941, 1992), ch. 2, “Language and Memory”, p. 43.
3. Thomas Richards,The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London and New York, 1993), pp. 73, 11, 6.
4. John Tagg,The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst MA, 1988), pp. 63–64. Similarly Rosalind Krauss, Allan Sekula, and others have used “the archive” as a “discursive space” in which photographic records, whether of landscape or the body, are made meaningful. See Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive”, and Rosalind Krauss, “Photography's Discursive Spaces”, both in Richard Bolton (ed.),The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photogrpahy (Cambridge MA, 1992), pp. 286–301, 343–388.
5. See Verne Harris, “Redefining Archives in South Africa: Public Archives and Society in Transition, 1990–1996”,Archivaria 42 (Fall 1996); and his complementary “Claiming Less, Delivering More: A Critique of Positivist Formulations on Archives in South Africa”,Archivaria 44 (Fall 1997); as well as his essay in this volume.