ABSTRACT
Memory policies, or to be more accurate, policies for dealing with the past, are not the same thing as archival policies. Memory policies tend to be produced in the short term, whereas most archival policies are long term, often designed for stability to guarantee the trustworthiness of records, which need to be sustainable and neutral for credibility and evidential value reasons. Archivists are asked to entertain the possibility that multiple perspectives are permissible of what “the past” might mean in the context of archival practice. The links created, as a result, between archives and institutions set up for the purpose of harnessing public memory policies have cast doubts over the credibility of archives, especially when memory policies are known to have undergone a complete political about-turn. The problem is that, in our everyday lives, human memory and computer memory have very different connotations, especially with regard to the ability to forget or deliberately suppress.
