The Right to be Forgotten and the New Archival Paradigm

Abstract

The variety of memory-preserving techniques (repetitive actions, verbal repetition, writing, visual representation, and so on), along with the rites and places put in the service of drill exercises, have produced, in the course of history, the institutional forms of memory preservation, more specifically those institutions in the modern sense, which have been responsible for the preservation and retrievability of externally recorded memory. Today these institutions typically function in the form of public institutions, of which the best known examples are museums, libraries and the archives.1 According to the layman’s view, the museums hold objects, the library keeps books and other publications and the archives preserve individual documents. And while it is worth pointing out that museums also hold documents valued as objects of historical interests (we must think of the clay writing tablets of Mesopotamia in the British Museum’s collection), while libraries also have collections of manuscripts (the National Library of France or the Library of Leiden University, to name only a few of the most significant ones) and the archives themselves may hold artefacts of documentary evidence (for example, the equipment used to produce samizdat literature, deposited with the OSA Archives), such a categorisation could still pass muster at a basic level.