“Contains Scenes of Mild Peril”: Illuminating the Catalogues of Dark Archives

Eve, Martin Paul (2025) “Contains Scenes of Mild Peril”: Illuminating the Catalogues of Dark Archives. In: Terras, Melissa and Gooding, Paul and Ames, Sarah (eds.) Library Catalogues as Data: Research, Practice, and Usage. London: Facet. (In Press)

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Abstract

In this chapter, I shine some light on the catalogues-as-data of the dark archives used in the preservation of scholarly communications. I begin by outlining the recent project work that I undertook with the goal of understanding how much scholarly material really is safely preserved. In turn, this leads me to a number of criticisms of the state of digital preservation catalogues; infrastructural deficiencies that are hindering our knowledge of what work can be saved and can form the basis of responsible future research corpora. In the second part of the chapter, I then turn to the preservation and cataloguing of computer viruses, attempting to think through the analogies to conventional knowledge destruction in this space, while also acknowledging that any form of credit – say in the form of a catalogue – can bring with it damaging incentives to create further malware. This exemplar discussion serves to highlight, again, the infrastructural deficiencies of a cataloguing system that focused primarily on the academic journal article and built itself outwards, but without adequate metadata profiles for “works” of this kind.

Metadata

Item Type:	Book Section
School:	Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
Depositing User:	Martin Eve
Date Deposited:	14 Jun 2024 14:14
Last Modified:	14 Jun 2024 14:14
URI:	https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/53704

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