Re-bordering the Archive: European Transnational Archives and Transnational Entanglements

Abstract

Two decades ago, the European Union began a major effort to digitize heritage and make it available through European-scale portals such as Europeana and EUscreen. These efforts were explicitly aimed at removing barriers - both the barriers of access to the archives as well as the national boundaries of heritage - to allow for new narratives of shared experience to develop. In this special issue we seek to reflect on how these changes have re-drawn the borders of audiovisual archives. Drawing on ideas of borders as complex assemblages, it seeks to understand how archival borders are shaped and transgressed by (socio)technical elements, legal and organizational elements, and cultural elements.