Drawing on interviews with archivists and developers, Jones and Jancovic reveal the archive as a dynamic space where deeply entrenched social practices produce disagreements but also resourceful collaborations. They contrast the unprecedented rise of archivist-driven standardization and controversies around non-standard technology with the historical dominance of the film and broadcast industries. Throughout, the authors clarify the role of tech companies, software developers, film pirates, hackers, and other players with poorly understood roles in the process.

A timely look at the state of audiovisual preservation, The Future of Memory provides a history of recent innovations alongside a snapshot of a field in the midst of profound technological change.

“The first history of film was written in 1894, when cinema had not been born yet. A quarter of the twenty-first century has elapsed, and no global history of digital media is still in sight. It would be a daunting task, worthy of a Jorge Luis Borges story, but Jones and Jancovic have succeeded in writing a key chapter of it. Don’t be deterred by its acronyms: you don’t have to be a computer geek to enjoy getting lost in the labyrinth of media archives’ quixotic struggle against impermanence.”--Paolo Cherchi Usai, George Eastman Museum

Jimi Jones is an adjunct lecturer of library and information sciences for the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Marek Jancovic is an assistant professor of media studies at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is the author of A Media Epigraphy of Video Compression: Reading Traces of Decay.