This essay considers two archives and their traces: the Banff New Media Institute (BNMI) and the Daniel Langlois Foundation (DLF). Both archives are the product of transitory but significant initiatives in the media arts and digital media context. Both suffered unanticipated project endings due to institutional and human agency and are now in varying stages of recovery and rediscovery. A third personal artistic, cultural, and social history collection – the Sara Diamond Fonds – seeks lessons from the endings of those first two archives; administrators of this third archive at the Christa Dahl Media Library and Archives and Simon Fraser University have developed a dynamic partnership strategy to prevent the same issues that resulted in the disappearance of the BNMI and DLF archives.[1] In the instances of the BNMI and DLF, disappearance has meant the removal from public access. Disappearance has a second meaning in the context of digital media whether online or platform (such as CDs, DVDs). As Grau, Hoth, and Wandl-Vogt (2019) stress: “Due to lack of institutional support and rapid changes in storage and presentation media, works that originated ten years ago can no longer be recovered technically for exhibition or preservation purposes” [Grau, Hoth, Wandl-Vogt 2019, 20]. Giselle Beiguelman further asks, “How to deal in the field of preservation and conservation with files that disappear, works that stop functioning, services that vanish from one day to the next [Beiguelman 2019, 118]? Media art works and Internet art rely on connections to databases, links, and third-party servers and services. Moreover, many works are interactive and contributor-driven so there is no easy beginning and end and often exist in many versions. Both interpretations of disappearance address the challenge that, as Sue Breakell suggests, “the records do not simply go through a life cycle from creation and currency through to interactivity and the archive but move in and out of currency” [Breakell 2008, 4]. This is in part an argument to sustain institutional archives that mark a specific time period and to exert best practices such as emulation in preserving digital materials and licensing to allow the use of copyrighted materials. It is also an argument for the creators of collections, whether inside institutions (BNMI), or as alternative archives (DLF, CDMLA), to negotiate clear accessioning and deaccessioning relationships with their own institution (The Banff Centre) or potential partner institutions (DLF, CDMLA) early in the process of creating or acquiring an archive, or as soon as there is a perceived sense of the significance of that collection, whether within the institution and/or the stakeholders that it serves.

The period of the late 1990s through the early twenty-first century was one of intense interest in archives on the part of institutions, governments, curators, and artists, and coincides with the creation of the BNMI and the DLF documentation centre. The “allure” of the archive, as Sue Breakell (2015) notes, was sparked by a heightened engagement with memory and the emergence of memory technologies (such as databases, hard drives, and centralized server storage). The drive to digitize meant that some records would be left behind, fueling concerns about inclusion, and about who should have the right to choose which materials would be digitized. The massive production of online materials seemed to some to be a gift towards a universal human memory; to others, “the more absolute knowledge on the Internet becomes, the harder it is to comprehend as it [knowledge] transforms into an unreadable amount of data” [Hoth 2021].

Post-modernism challenged the authoritative nature of historical records and archives, in part instigated by Michel Foucault’s (1969) analysis of archives as a demonstration of relationships and institutions in process, perpetually incomplete repositories that represent power, through what is present and absent in their contents. Jacques Derrida in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, argues for the political nature of the archive, observing that power resides in control over its content and access. Anticipating the rise of the Internet and digital preservation, he astutely described a contemporary obsession with archives and the desire to preserve. He painted a tension between the public domain and personal memory materials that plays out today, for example, in debates about the right to be forgotten,[2] or the ways that social media intermingle personal and institutional commentary and politics, or the growing interface between personal health data collection and medical records. In An Archival Impulse (2004), Hal Foster recognizes the archival turn and analyzes three kinds of artists’ works: those that use archival content, those where the artist performs methods drawn from archival practices, and those in which artists create unique archives. Powerful works have occurred when archivists invite artists into collections to create new interpretations. The Artist-in-Residency Program at the City of Portland Archives and Record Centre supported Portland Archives artists-in-residence Garrick Imatini and Kaia Sand. They interviewed selected subjects who were documented in the city’s Police Bureau’s surveillance fonds of 576 activists, augmenting the police fonds with “lives embedded, yet silenced, in the records”, resulting in a new understanding of that history and the expungement of criminal records [Carbone 2015, 51]. Antonio Muntadas’ The File Room is at the same time both an emulation and critique of archival practices and an archive in its own right. It is a project intentionally without an ending, a travelling installation of physical archival files and a connected and collectively created and ongoing database of instances of censorship–political, cultural, and scientific.[3] The historical context provides a framework for motivations and activities at the core of the three case studies that follow.

Archives and archivists have various standards to guide them in considering which collections to acquire, the methods of accessioning collections and conditions to deaccession collections. The Canadian Council of Archives (CCA, 2018) describes accessioning as, “… the physical and legal addition of predominantly unpublished documentary material to an archival repository’s holdings. It follows an archival appraisal decision identifying the records as having enduring value in relation to the acquisition mandate and policies of the repository.”[4] The Society of American Archivists (SAS) provides terms, process and considerations for deaccessioning [Society of American Archivists 2017]. Deaccessioning represents the removal of materials from an archive and is perceived by most archives to be a component of best practices, but it is understandably controversial. SAS argues that policy and guidelines are needed, with clear options for the materials deaccessioned. Decisions should be made by archivists, the archive, and its home institution. Processes need to be transparent, properly documented, and overseen in an ethical manner. The SAS suggests that deeds of gift should include clear deaccessioning terms. Reasons for deaccessioning materials include reappraisal of a collection’s relevance to institutional mandate, frequency of use, its potential research value, whether it would be more meaningful and better used in a different repository, its condition, and maintenance costs. Other considerations include the ability to define provenance, or legal requirements to retain documents over time periods. Archives ideally seek a transfer of fonds to a different repository. They may return materials to original owners, or they may sell the collection or, ultimately, destroy the records. These routes are relevant for the case studies considered below.

Also relevant are increased options in collections management and permissions, given the rise of digitization and the acquisition of creative media works. The British Archive for Contemporary Writing has adopted two complementary practices, the creation of a “storehouse” and a “collection.” The first is the short-term loan of writers’ archives to support thematic archival research, for example for six months rather than the 20 years minimum required by most archives [Whibley, Sara 2019]. The goal is that emerging writers will see BACW as a trusted agent, and that writers will provide their archives to the collection as their careers mature [University of East Anglia 2022]. Licensing is an alternative to “deposit” as it allows multiple institutions to hold digital materials and retains the originator’s copyright. For example, with a deposit license, such as that of the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA, 2014), the intellectual property creator retains their rights and can continue to license it and earn revenue and agrees to grant the University a non-exclusive, sub-licensable, worldwide license to store and access the work to the public.

The last decades have witnessed continued dialogue within the archival community and between communities and archivists that shift archival best practices in relation to Indigenous records and records of other vulnerable groups. This includes replevin, or repatriating holdings to Indigenous groups at their request, or the renegotiation of ownership and access with Indigenous peoples for archives remaining in collections. Call 70 of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission requires the inclusion of Indigenous recordkeepers and researchers, their perspectives, and their methodologies within the Canadian archival system. Critical archival studies foster archival practices that resist reinforcing oppression based on race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. Instead, the goal is to develop inclusive, accessible, multivocal sites for cultural participation and dissemination [Caswell & Cifor 2019].

Perhaps institutions, creators of archives, and their users all bear responsibility for the protection and continuity of archives. Individuals have affective ties to the artists and archives that house their work and that they have built, but it is not viable to rely only on a few knowledgeable and emotionally-attached individuals. Collections within institutions, alternative archives, and significant fonds would benefit from strategies and contracts that address deaccessioning and alternative repositories. Temporary forms of accessioning such as the storehouse may serve to test interest in a collection before its donation. Where possible, donor commitments to raise dollars for maintenance and dissemination in partnership with archives are beneficial but should not lead to excluding the acquisition of fonds from marginalized groups. Institutions need to address duty of care for fonds representing Indigenous knowledge and history. Knowledge dissemination that creates new interest and new proponents for an archive including its recovery and rereading is both an individual and an institutional responsibility. Dr. Jennifer Kennedy from Queen’s University serves as an example — she is exploring the BNMI archives to understand contemporary feminist practices in new media that were sparked through encounters at the BNMI events and its co-productions and became a strong advocate for its revitalization (2021). The partnership between VIVO, other archives, and community organizations and underrepresented groups should stimulate ongoing interpretation of my fonds. And the renewal of the BNMI’s Indigenous media archive through oral histories is testimony to effective user activism.