Born-digital, stored physical: considering carriers in a hybrid personal archive

Online version of a paper presented at BDCAM25, 3 April 2025

ABSTRACT. Within digital preservation literature, the physical carriers of born-digital records – floppy discs, CD-Rs, hard drives – are treated as temporary and incidental to the content which is to be preserved. Yet while this may be true in an organisational context, within an individual’s archive the carrier can often be vital context. This paper will look at examples of born-digital records from the archive of writer and designer Charles Jencks (1939-2019) to explore what can be learned from the physical carriers, and how best to describe and convey this information within the archival catalogue.

The floppy disks within Jencks’ archive show evidence of regular re-use and re-labelling of containers, which echo his professional practice of re-visiting and substantially re-writing his own publications. Annotations in multiple handwriting also show the evidence of an unseen second individual, presumed to be a PA. The paper will argue that in these instances the physical carrier is crucial for understanding the context of the records’ creation and that the migration process – while essential for preservation – entails many of the same trade-offs as the digitisation of physical records.

Jencks’ architectural criticism was closely associated with postmodernism, and the catalogue of his archive is attempting to follow his principles. In particular, this means a commitment to the visibility of the archival process and the role that the archivist plays in shaping the historical record. By making decisions about what to record within the catalogue, the archivist helps to shape and co-create the archival record. While this was less obvious with paper records, with born-digital the archivist can no longer pretend this intrusion isn’t happening; the question is more how to record it.

Text: copyright Anna McNally

Images: courtesy of Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House

My name is Anna and I’m the archivist and collections manager for the Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House, managing the archive of Charles Jencks.

I’m going to start today by introducing a little bit about Charles Jencks, as the project is concerned not only with archiving his papers, but doing so in a way that feels appropriate to his ideas and work. I’ll then move on to looking at 3 examples of born-digital records in the archive and the issues that they raise. The project is at a fairly early stage so I’m presenting work in progress, and keen to get feedback on some of the issues at hand.

So firstly, Charles Jencks. Charles was an American who made his home in London. In architecture circles, he needs no introduction.

His best-selling book, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture sold approximately 150,000 copies - across 6 editions and 11 languages, not including the unofficial translations that circulated in China and the Soviet Union. Significantly, each of these six editions is not just a re-release with a new cover and an updated introduction, but a significantly re-written work.

Similarly, his famous ‘evolutionary tree of architecture’ diagram, which first appeared in his phd, was also worked and re-worked throughout his lifetime. This is obviously crucial for the archive, both in terms of researchers wanting to map developments over time and pinpoint changes, but also as a key to how we manage the collection. Charles was re-visiting and working from his own archive throughout his life and it’s important that the collection maintains that sense of possibility and flexibility rather than becoming static.

Even if you’re not aware of him as an architecture critic, you may have encountered some of his other work - either as the co-founder of the Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres which were set up in memory of his wife Maggie Keswick Jencks and based on her idea, or his landscape designs - his Landform at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art won the Gulbenkian prize in 2004, his 2012 Northumberlandia, otherwise known as The Lady of The North, and the Garden of Cosmic Speculation which he and Maggie created at her family home in Scotland.

Here in London, Charles and Maggie worked with the architect Terry Farrell to create a family home that explored the idea of architecture as language and narrative, rather than the Modernist conception of space. Originally called The Thematic House, before his death Charles began the process of turning the house into a museum but sadly he died in 2019 without seeing the project brought to fruition. Today The Cosmic House, as it is now known, is home to the Jencks Foundation, a laboratory of Post-Modern culture that frames architecture in its most universal context, seeking to understand the man-made as an expression of our cosmic existence.

The Cosmic House is also an archive. Within english, the word archive has two meanings - both a collection of historic materials, and the building in which such a collection is kept. This is a wonderful example of the double-coding that Charles relished in post-modern architecture, and the playful way in which we’re approaching this project. Rather than being sent to another institution, the archive is managed within the House, with his books remaining in situ and his study used as a reading room.

But as a means of managing the museum, we have catalogued the house and its contents as part of the Charles Jencks Fonds - so the archive (the repository) is in the archive (the Fonds), and the archive (the Fonds) is in the archive (the repository).

A diagram showing the relationship between the archive (repository) and archive (fonds)

But aside from the idiosyncracy of the house being an archive and having a house in the archive - the archive - by which I mean the Fonds, Charles’ papers - is a hybrid archive in the conventional notion of the term in that it includes both paper and digital records. The archive covers his school days through to his death, so roughly 1950 to 2019, and with it all the technologies supporting communication during that time period. So at one end of the spectrum we have handwritten letters and sketchbooks, through to typescript drafts, then on to faxes, floppy disks, CD-Rs and finally memory sticks and websites.

A diagram showing some of the formats in the Charles Jencks archive

A conventional approach would divide these formats between the paper records and the born-digital. But what I want to argue today is that this line is actually fairly fuzzy, and there’s actually more of a hybrid area in the middle than archival literature has traditionally given credit to.

The idea of hybridity is one that’s particularly important for Charles, and therefore to this project. When we ask, what does it mean for an archive to be post-modern, we need to determine whose version of postmodernity we’re judging it by. Obviously in this case it’s clearly going to be Charles Jencks’, and I have a couple of his definitions that I use as yardsticks for my work.

Charles Jencks' notes on a definition of post-modernism

Firstly there’s this notes in his files from the 1990s. Here he defines post-modern as an ambiguous in between term - thus hybrid. And in this quote he defines post-modern architecture as a hybrid language.

Charles Jencks in What is Post-modernism? (1989)

And this quote is particular useful because if you replace all the instances of architecture with archives, and architects with archivists, then you get a great definition of post-modern archives, so thanks for that Charles.

Charles Jencks in What is Post-modernism? (1989), annotations by Anna McNally

I should pause here to make clear again that this project is about creating an archive for Charles Jencks that is appropriate to Charles Jencks’ ideas and work. That isn’t to say that this approach is necessarily suitable for all collections and that all archives should be post-modern. However I hope that some of the questions that are raised by managing this particular archive in this particular way will have resonance both for archivists managing other collections, and researchers approaching other archives.

So anyway back to our hybrid archive. On the one hand we have handwritten records, which are clearly very very analogue. And then we have a website, which is 100% digital. But many of these other formats sit in a hinterland between, and today I’d like to discuss three small examples.

Digital made physical (1):

CD-R found in Charles Jencks' archive, currently uncatalogued

The first example that I want to talk about is a CD-R.

The files on a CD-R are created on a computer - so born-digital - but then they’re burnt onto the CD-R, either due to a lack of memory on the original computer, or the desire to share them or move them onto a different device. They never stop being digital during this time - but they also acquire physical properties when they’re put onto a disc.

And these physical properties have very meaningful significance. Firstly, in terms of their preservation, although they’re digital files, temperature and humidity can now affect them and I have to stress about their environmental management as much as I do the paper documents.

But secondly, it affects their status as records.

One of the definitions of records is that they are evidence of a transaction, an exchange between two people. This CD-R is a great example of that because the surface has literally been used to write a short letter - Dear Charles, I haven’t seen the article and how they’ve used the pictures. Hope it was good. Here’s the CD as promised, best wishes.

Charles has then annotated on the case ‘article in S. Times? Sept 2011 Photos 19 Lansdowne Walk’.

So we have: -the images that are contained on the CD-R -the technical metadata about the images contained in the files on the CD-R -a written message from what I presume is the photographer to Charles -Charles’ own annotation on the CD case reminding him what is on it, presumably written some time after the fact as he can’t remember which publication it was for.

From a digital preservation perspective, we need to get these files off the CD-R. These are a fairly unstable format, especially if they’ve not been stored well which this wasn’t. The unlocking our sound heritage project found a far higher failure rate for CD-Rs than older obsolete formats, which isn’t particularly reassuring. The overwhelming advice is to migrate the files off the CD-R, which presents very few technical challenges. We have a CD reader, and software to create an exact copy of the file and preserve all the technical metadata, so that’s fine.

But then that still leaves the message written on the CD-R itself and Charles’ annotation on the case. One way to deal with this would be to digitise the CD and the case and then attach these to the catalogue record alongside the digital images. However we’ve then created a composite record where the two halves have undergone different processes - one has been digitised and one has been migrated. If we want to be a post-modern archive, we would need to find a way on the catalogue to acknowledge this

And again, I want to emphasise that this is context specific.

In a previous role we acquired several hundred CD-Rs from the marketing team containing ten years worth of digital photographs of institutional events. We ripped the images from the CD-Rs, transcribed the information from the cases onto the catalogue and threw away the physical carriers as obsolete. In that case the carriers weren’t records in their own right - the only transaction that they recorded was that the marketing department hadn’t yet convinced the IT team they needed their own server.

But this CD-R is different. Just as the archive sits within the archive at The Cosmic House, these discs are also double-coded - the plastic mount is not just a carrier but a record in its own right. The record sits within a record.

The digital made physical (2):

Floppy disk found in Charles Jencks' archive, currently uncatalogued

The second example I want to look at is a floppy disk.

Like the CD-R we looked at before, this disk has two handwritings on it. The spidery scrawl is Charles’ handwriting and the neat handwriting is, I think, one of his PAs.

This labelling is fairly standard for Charles’ floppy disks. Like the CD-Rs, the files on the floppy disks start out digital and remain digital once they are put onto a disk, but also acquire physical properties. They are carefully labelled by his PA as she makes a neat back-up of his work, perhaps for him to transport between different computers. Then he seemingly takes whichever floppy disk is closest to hand and adds to it. And adds to it again. And then updates it to say it’s ‘WRONG’ without indicating what is wrong about it.

In this floppy disk we therefore have: -word processed files written by Charles Jencks -technical metadata about the files on the disk -evidence of back-up practices through the mixture of Charles and his PA’s labelling

What’s significant to me here is that the way in which Charles is managing these floppy disks is akin to the way he manages his paper files. Files are never just on one topic, they’re more akin to Andy Warhol’s time capsules, with a smattering of whatever was passing through his desk that week.

Similarly his archive contains (at a conservative extimate) 15,000 35mm slides, all stored in labelled boxes. The boxes are re-used, and annotated, giving us clues to the alternative ways that the slides were categorised and re-arranged.

Slide boxes from Charles Jencks' archive, ref CJA-RES-AL-SM-2-5, 6,7, 8, 9

The topic of original order in personal papers is a huge area that I don’t have time to delve into today. However often, when an original order is respected, it represents a person’s thoughts and feelings towards the end of their life and creates a sense of fixed meaning that may not have been the case throughout the rest of their life.

In the preface to the fourth edition of What is Post-Modernism, another book which Charles wrote and re-wrote throughout his life, he specifically references how moving to writing on a computer has influenced his writing. “This hybrid book started life as a conference paper in 1985 … Now, thanks to a computer which allowed me to reconsider the whole, it is I hope easier to understand if still eclectic." This means that this early era of floppy disks is likely to be key to understanding not only the content of his writing but also his methods, and the archive needs to be described in a way that both are available to researchers.

The annotations on this floppy disk, with their multiple handwriting and multiple pen colours clearly demonstrate that this disk was used over a period of time. They also demonstrate a continuation of practices across the physical and digital aspects of the archive. By highlighting them we can maintain a sense of flux and ambiguity, and resist the notion of it as a settled collection with an a priori order.

The digital made physical (3):

Printed-out emails in Charles Jencks' archive, ref CJA-RES-AL-B14-4-19

The final example I want to talk about is one I’ve found throughout the archive - the printed out email.

Whereas my other examples have been born-digital records that were maintained digitally but with additional physical information added, here we have a record that’s born-digital, but through being made physical it loses its digital properties.

We briefly introduced Charles’ PA in the last example when we looked at the floppy disk, but here they’re playing a more active role in the creation of these records.

For many years, as far as I can tell, Charles wasn’t managing his own email inbox. His PA was printing out his emails for him, he would write the reply on the print-out, and they would type it and send it back.

So we have the slightly unexpected situation where - if we’re looking from the perspective of Charles Jencks as the author of these records - the born-digital reply is effectively the copy, and the annotated print-out is the original.

So in this document we have: -the information contained in the original email -some of the technical metadata in the header -evidence of the transaction through the printing and annotating -information about the content of Charles’ reply

Again, overlapping records within one physical document and no easy way to acknowledge all the different transactions and actors within the catalogue.

Moreover how, then, should we treat the born-digital emails? Do we delete Charles’ in-boxes as effectively copies and I don’t need to worry about managing them as digital? Do we treat them as digitisations of the paper records? Do we catalogue them as a separate sub-fonds - or even a Fonds - of his PA?

Rather than a personal archive, what we really have here is a micro-business archive. As well as his PA, there is also the gardener who he collaborated with at the Garden of Cosmic Speculation, as well as various craftsmen who brought his furniture and sculpture ideas to life. Yet the traditional method of cataloguing personal papers as a standalone Fonds, in a hierarchy with the individual at the top and their activities spread out like a tree below them does little to emphasise the collaborations and partnerships that characterise most creative output.

On one level, I’m not seeking to fight against this. The cataloguing for this project is using the international standard of archival description, which might seem at first like a slightly odd decision for a post-modern project. ISAD(G) is effectively a modernist framework, standardising archival descriptive metadata to one template.

If we look back at Charles’ definitions of post-modernism we can also see that, within these tests I have set for the project, using ISAD(G) is not incompatible. Charles states that post-modernism is critical of but not anti-modernism. This project is giving me the opportunity to work with ISAD(G) critically, stretching it to its limits and seeing what it’s capable of. Because the majority of fields are free text, it actually allows for considerable creative freedom around how the archivist chooses to describe the records. Just as a post-modern building still obeys the convention of walls, a roof, windows and doors but adds ornamental features, so we are using the structure of ISAD(G) but writing the text with a specific tone and language that tries to convey the complexity of the archive - what Robert Venturi describes as the ‘messy vitality over obvious unity’.

Charles also defines post-modernism as looking to the future, which is crucial to me as an archivist. While it might seem like our profession is devoted to the past, it’s actually focussed on the future - how can we hand these documents, this information, this evidence from the present onto the next generation of custodians and, ideally, make sure they don’t hate us in the process. Creating any kind of bespoke cataloguing software would not only create a huge financial burden on the project now but also a technical debt for the project in the future. Future custodians would have to support not only the physical archive, and the digital archive but also find ways of preserving the structure of its metadata as well. Using an international standard gives us the freedom to use off-the-shelf software and then nimbly move to another as new features and functionality become available.

The three examples I’ve shared today are all relatively simple from a digital preservation perspective. Yet if we consider them along with their physical carrier then this creates a multi-layered and complex document which doesn’t neatly fit into archival cataloguing conventions. This presents a challenge for archivists in describing these documents, and for researchers in understanding them, when the physical and digital aspects can no longer be used together. I hope I’ve demonstrated that when we talk about hybrid archives, this needs to be understood more as an overlapping than as a binary.

(ends)