Before the Boxes Disappear: How Ordinary Decisions Unmake a Community Archive

Abstract

This essay examines how community collections disappear without a disaster, through moves, unaffordable storage, organizational closures, and reasonable decisions made under deadline. It argues that physical survival is not archival survival, since a collection can remain wholly intact while the knowledge that makes it legible quietly recedes. Against the assumption that digitization constitutes rescue, it proposes documentation before movement, container-level inventory, established authority, and a written continuity plan as the measures that decide whether a collection endures.