Editor's Foreword

Abstract

As I write these lines, the Association of Moving Image Archivists is preparing its conference in Boston, the first with a major focus on digital archiving issues. As we in AMIA all know, there is a paradigm shift of enormous proportions going on: we are moving away from a culture of objects to one of electronic bytes. The very materiality of traditional media will become obsolete in the foreseeable future. Some of us see this as an advantage; others mourn the loss of that materiality. How many theories of art, of photography, of cinema are grounded in the specific physical characteristics of the media? How will these media change when they no longer exist except as free-floating information in cyberspace? Archivists are by nature conservatives—at least in the spheres of art, culture, and technology—because it has traditionally been our job to conserve cultural artifacts in their original state. While commercial enterprises are constantly improving technology in the interest of efficiency and cost in order to produce higher profits, archivists are usually governed less by profit and loss (unless they work for private companies) than by the notion that moving image media have an intrinsic value apart from their informational content.