Plus ça change …? The Salutary Tale of the Telephone and its Implications for Archival Thinking about the Digital Revolution

Abstract

A digital revolution, it has been claimed, has transformed records management and archival practice, and raised the fear that the inability to capture information created via new media is leading to a significant loss in information secured for the future. In its own day, the invention and adoption of the telephone revolutionised long-distance communications, shifting many transactions to an oral medium which left little in the way of records. This paper will explore whether the advent of the digital era is the conceptual revolution that it is often claimed to be, based on an analogy with the advent of the telephone.