In the context of the rise of archive studies, this book attends specifically and meta-critically to the figure of the library as a particular archival form, considering the traits that constitute (or fail to constitute) the library as institution or idea, and questions its relations to other accumulative modes, such as the archive in its traditional sense, the museum, or the filmic or digital archive. Across their diversity, and in addition to their international standard of research and writing, each chapter is unified by commitment to analyzing the complex cultural politics of the library form.
Sas Mays is Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Critical Theory in the Department of English, Linguistics, and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster, London. His overall research concerns mediations of cultural memory through technological and archival forms, from the textual to the visual, and the analogue to the digital.