The keynote speaker this morning is Malcolm Gillies, the DVC (Education) at Australian National University. He provides a brief history of cultural transmission, from remembered oral tradition to the emergence of the written word (which suffered its first tragedy with the demise of the library at Alexandria). Massive duplication through printing made text less vulnerable to loss, and gave information a tangible form. Now, however, digitisation has made information intangible again, as well as flexible and ephemeral.
Forms of communication have multiplied and diversified with the new electronic and digital networks, and only a few of these are being covered by archives and libraries so far. This may constitute an 'archival dark age', Malcolm suggests. (This, indeed, already started with earlier electronic forms - the thermal fax, early digital music recordings, etc.). The Web only intensifies this problem - and there is also a problem of overlap between it and other forms of communicaton.
