WAn archive is an accumulation of historical records – in any media – or the physical facility in which they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization's lifetime, and are kept to show the function of that person or organization. Professional archivists and historians generally understand archives to be records that have been naturally and necessarily generated as a product of regular legal, commercial, administrative, or social activities. They have been metaphorically defined as "the secretions of an organism", and are distinguished from documents that have been consciously written or created to communicate a particular message to posterity.
WArchival research is a type of research which involves seeking out and extracting evidence from archival records. These records may be held either in collecting institutions, such as libraries and museums, or in the custody of the organization that originally generated or accumulated them, or in that of a successor body. Archival research can be contrasted with (1) secondary research, which involves identifying and consulting secondary sources relating to the topic of enquiry; and (2) with other types of primary research and empirical investigation such as fieldwork and experiment.
WThe Arctic World Archive (AWA) is a facility for data preservation, located in the Svalbard archipelago on the island of Spitsbergen, Norway, not far from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. It contains data of historical and cultural interest from several countries, as well as all of American multinational company GitHub's open source code, in a deeply buried steel vault, with the data storage medium expected to last for 500 to 1000 years. It is run as a profit-making business by private company Piql and the state-owned coal-mining company Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani (SNSK).
WLukas Birk is an Austrian photographer, archivist, and publisher. He is known for a visual archive work in Myanmar and research on Box Camera photography in Afghanistan. Birk has worked on photographic projects, films and visual research in China, South and South-East Asia and the Indian subcontinent. He has published numerous books on visual culture and photographic history.
WThe Digital Himalaya project was established in December 2000 by Mark Turin, Alan Macfarlane, Sara Shneiderman, and Sarah Harrison. The project's principal goal is to collect and preserve historical multimedia materials relating to the Himalaya, such as photographs, recordings, and journals, and make those resources available over the internet and offline, on external storage media. The project team have digitized older ethnographic collections and data sets that were deteriorating in their analogue formats, so as to protect them from deterioration and make them available and accessible to originating communities in the Himalayan region and a global community of scholars.
WA guestbook is a paper or electronic means for a visitor to acknowledge a visit to a site, physical or web-based, and leave details such as their name, postal or electronic address and any comments. Such paper-based ledgers or books are traditional in churches, at weddings, funerals, B&Bs, museums, schools, institutions and other private facilities open to the public. Some private homes keep visitors' books. Specialised forms of guestbooks include hotel registers, wherein guests are required to provide their contact information, and Books of Condolence, which are used at funeral homes and more generally after notable public deaths, such as the death of a monarch or president, or after a public disaster, such as an airplane crash.
WThe League of Nations archives is a collection of the historical records and official documents of the League of Nations. The collection is housed at the United Nations Office at Geneva (UNOG), where it is managed by the Institutional Memory Section (IMS) of the UN Library & Archives Geneva. It consists of approximately 15 million pages of content and comprises nearly 3 linear kilometers. The League of Nations archives' historical significance is recognized by UNESCO, with its inscription on the Memory of the World Register in 2009.
WNot Forgotten Digital Preservation Library LLC, based in Princeton, NJ, United States, is an organization established to create, record and preserve time capsules. The library registers and maps all types of time capsule projects worldwide, and catalogs them on the WorldCat.