While archives and special collections are collecting at an unprecedented pace, growth and shrinkage have become close partners. As constraints swell and digitization marches on, deaccessioning has moved from the periphery of practice toward the center. Entire legacy media forms—newspapers, academic journals, videotapes, reference works, maps, even film—are becoming digital by default. Rather than replaying old polemics and engaging in nostalgia for paper, ink and celluloid, this talk will treat broader issues that have received much less examination. How do physical materials held by libraries and archives become obsolete, then inconvenient, and finally difficult? Does inconvenience have its merits? Do objects in these categories have the right to exist? Are certain affordances introduced only when physical and digital collections interact? How might bibliography, filmography and mediagraphy remediate and repair gaps in collections introduced by their custodians? And, in a time when monuments celebrating white supremacy are being pulled off their pedestals, are librarians and archivists practicing erasure or healing? – RP

Rick Prelinger presents Houghton Library’s George Parker Winship Lecture which will be held in the Forum Room of the Lamont Library. A reception at Houghton Library in the Edison and Newman Room will follow.