ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates, through an analysis of some of the underlying design principles that were used to enact the Circus Oz Living Archive, how this understanding of the archive as software manifests in practice. Digital archives that are constituted of digital records, in which case the records may have been digitised or they may be born digital. In contrast to Weinberger's definition, Manovich's formulation suggests another kind of livingness in digital archives that of livingness through design representation. If media is a representation of data, a revealing, then the archive-software is a representation engine, as it reveals aspects of the contents of the archive: the digital archive achieves its artefactual status only through these acts of representation. Software is unique in its materiality in that it can be copied with no physical effort and effectively no loss in fidelity. The application programming interface (API) is the essential infrastructure or platform that makes other archive software possible.
