This article analyses archivists’ and historians’ experiences of archival absence in nineteenth-century Europe. It takes off in well-known processes of centralisation, nationalisation and dislocations of archives to discuss how experiences of missing documents and holdings have shaped historiographical practice and thought. Drawing on theorisations of archival silences, imagined records and materiality, the article argues that although ideas about the past are immaterial, archivists’ and historians’ perceptions of history relied on archival materiality. This is illustrated by two case studies of fragmented, supranational holdings: the establishment of the Central Archive of the Teutonic Order in Habsburg Vienna, and lost archives in the Baltic provinces of Romanov Russia. The article shows how practices such as mappings of holdings, negotiations of restitutions and provenance, and publications of source editions materialised absence. Enquiries into absence certainly generated new knowledge about archives, past dislocations and loss. However, the article also demonstrates that investigations of absence have produced ignorance and further absences. In conclusion, the article argues the benefits of absence studies. The cases illuminate that absence was a material issue with an intricate relationship to imagined documents and holdings. Moreover, the article recognises a long history of archival silences, which may take different forms and affect different groups throughout history. Lastly, the article addresses the issue of representation and argues the value of disregarding the nation when historicising theoretically pressing issues such as archival absence and its materiality.

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights gives individuals the freedom of opinion and expression, which includes the right to information access. In an archival context, information access can mean many things. In this paper, I have focused on accessibility for Disabled users. What does it mean for archival materials or websites to be “accessible”? To begin answering this question, I examined 55 archives’ online materials using three metrics: discoverability, usability, and readability. For this project, discoverability focuses on the logic of the paths from an archive's homepage to target items. Usability evaluates the implementation of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and the presence of multiple access points for information. Readability looks at the reading levels of descriptive text using Flesch–Kincaid analysis and the presence of text alternatives. I find that, at present, discoverability, usability, and readability for the examined archival materials are low. However, by breaking down the broad idea of “accessibility” into three categories, improving that reality might become easier. Specific strategies for increasing discoverability, usability, and readability are also discussed.

Rich evidence from Egypt as a province of the Roman Empire documents a curious story of local public archives being mismanaged over a period of several decades after their creation by the Roman state in the mid-first century CE. The events involved the destruction of records by pests and through a failure to catalogue and index them. Precisely why this happened remains a mystery. Was this a case of subaltern resistance by local elites tasked with maintaining Roman state archives, a targeted aim of which was to generate administrative knowledge about private wealth? Or had local liturgists misunderstood or been overwhelmed by the demands imposed by the Roman imperial administration? This story will be compared with other evidence of the destruction of public records in the Roman Empire, which underscores how invasive Roman record-keeping institutions were perceived to be.

The purpose of this paper is to document the creation of the Archivo del Paro #28A, a digital archive created in Colombia as a result of the social mobilizations that took place in 2021. To this end, we situate the cycle of protests that has been referred to as “social outburst” in a context of economic, political, and social crisis deepened by the effects of unequal management of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also in a context of political opening following the peace agreements between the State and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—People’s Army (FARC-EP) in 2016. In this context, we argue that the social outburst of 2021 constituted a historical milestone in terms of democratic political participation and, consequently, we respond to the ethical and political duty of archiving it. We then show that the project for creating the Archivo del Paro #28A is inspired by other initiatives that have taken place in the international arena. Finally, we describe the process of creating the archive through the campaign “Hacer eterno lo efímero” [Making the ephemeral last forever], which framed the processes of gathering, classification, valuation, and dissemination of the collected documents as a strategy to achieve a broad diversity of voices.