Online archives and virtual collections

This issue of Southern Review brings together contributors from backgrounds in history, media and communications, information technology, museum studies and education. Each discusses the ways in which the digitisation of documents and the availability of online records, searchable and sent straight to the desktop, is changing research and teaching. Archives and information retrieval might seem like a dusty topic. Some thrive on the hunt through the records, but most researchers struggle to contain their own archives, much less come to terms with the amount of material ready for them to read, retrievable from their desktop. Piles of paper mount up in the office, the home study or the shed. One reference system replaces another, until there are layers of database versions, hypercards, card indexes and shoeboxes of stuff. These collections are often unplanned; they might be idiosyncratic, but they are probably not private. We live in an archived present. Even the most digital communications-keystrokes, floods of email, the trails of web trawling-are mechanically archived many times over. Efforts to archive HTML pages on the World Wide Web continue, even as the copies of these pages cached on individual desktops multiply. Deletion often seems pointless, but there are new disciplines for managing the memory of machines. [Introduction]