Los objetivos del Ranking Mundial de Universidades en la Red

This chapter has examined the development and continuing evolution of the blues archive in the digital age, and has considered the role of the internet in creating repositories of public knowledge of blues music and blues culture. The overlap between the library, the museum and the archive has been discussed in order to emphasise the collapsing boundaries between these RPKs and in the physical world and online. The distinction between public and private archives has been drawn, and examples illustrating the challenges posed by the presences and absences of archival gatekeeping and the “curatorial gaze” (Hooper-Greenhill, 1992, p. 167) have been discussed.

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The video streaming platform YouTube has been excluded from this specific discussion, as despite the presence of blues material on the service, YouTube is not specifically a blues outlet. YouTube does however represent an important source of acculturation and enculturation for blues music and blues culture, and is discussed both as part of the academy in chapter 5, and as a presentation platform for performers in chapter 8. Similarly, although sites such as archive.org make available wax cylinder and 78rpm recordings in the public domain, the blues is only a very small part of its total output, and so its function and that of similar sites is represented by the discussion of the Alan Lomax Archive.

The impact of the internet on the blues archive seems primarily to have made recordings and disparate published works more readily available, and to have provided new avenues for investigation. Several black newspapers, for example, The Chicago Defender, have now been scanned and up-loaded to provide topical information about performers' activities

(pqarchiver.com, n.d.). Census data from the early 20th _{century available through government sites}

similarly supports scholarly research into the background, movements and whereabouts of performers.

There are still omissions, ruptures and discontinuities, however. The archives of some deceased early researchers were donated to various universities and museums, where they lie uncatalogued and in some cases unavailable to scholars. The huge collection of 78 records (including many blues records) in the EMI vaults in Hayes, Middlesex is apparently no longer accessible since the demise of John R. T. Davies (B. Hall, 2016a). The tensions and frustrations caused by this inaccessibility and seeming neglect within the blues community have been illustrated in this chapter here by

discussion of the archive of Mack McCormick.

Very few costly new transcriptions of pre-war blues records are now being issued by companies like Yazoo because they are immediately copied by cheap labels like JSP and Document. The bible of pre-war recording research, Blues & Gospel Records 1890-1943 by Dixon, Godrich & Rye is not yet

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available on-line, although I understand that the 5th _{edition is forthcoming and will be issued “on}

CD-ROM” (Vernon, 2016). This physical format is itself unusually dated given that many laptop computers now no longer contain optical drives (Kyrnin, 2016), and so this may alter before its publication.

The developing nature of the blues corpus from oral to physical to digital has expanded the availability of materials and increased the fidelity of archival recordings beyond the limitations of western symbolic notation. What can we expect from twenty-first century archive theory, beyond digitization and database architectures? Will the elites, as illustrated by the RBF, establish

safeguarded “islands in the Net” where essential knowledge is stored, leaving the majority floating in their own data trash (Lovink, 2013, p. 194)?

This chapter has highlighted the challenges with addressing the media of the past in digital spaces, without the guiding authority of a curatorial presence. Should these materials be grouped

narratively, or by discrete alphanumeric ciphering, such as signatures of documents and objects? These questions are problematic, because the answers themselves depend on the very agencies being thematised: the archive, the library, and the museum. Whatever will be said, stored or shown has already passed “…a process of selection, transport, inventarization, and storage according to classification,” (Ernst, 2013, p. 117).

The Internet is no archive indeed but rather a collection. The function of archives exceeds by far mere storage and conservation of data. Instead of just collecting passively, archives actively define what is at all able to be archived (Kittler, 1990, p. 232), insofar as they determine as well what is allowed to be forgotten, because “…the archival operation first of all consists of separating the documents. The question is to know what to keep and what to abandon.” (Ernst, 2013, p. 92) Such is the difference between a paper-based (state) archive in the strict, memory-institutional sense, and the Internet: the archive is a given, well-defined lot; the Internet, on the contrary, is a

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collection not just of unforeseen texts but of sound and images as well, an anarchive of sensory data for which no genuine archival culture has been developed.

According to Jacques Derrida (1995), “The twentieth century, the first in history to be exhaustively documented by audio-visual archives, found itself under the spell of what a contemporary

philosopher has called ‘archive fever,’ a fever that, given the World Wide Web’s digital storage capacities, is not likely to cool any time soon.”

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