ABSTRACT
Archive is a cultural technique and archiving a practice of collecting or accumulating, preserving, and making materials retrievable. The purpose of archives has changed from being administrative instruments of premodern regimes to serve the historical fascination of the period of romanticism in the beginning of the 19th century and the primarily European nationalist and imperial endeavours during the following 100 years. The different perceptions of provenance and the nature of the record as, for instance, evidence, information, and persistent representations, are kin to the several competing perspectives of the nature of archives in the archival literature. From the perspective of a critical scrutiny of digitisation, archive is a concept that captures in practice and in theory something very fundamental to the underpinnings of the aspirations to digitise and keep digital artefacts, whether the archives would be small, large, public, private, fleeting, or long-lived.
