... worlds of maintenance and repair and the instances of breakdown that occasion them are not separate or alternative to innovation, but sites for some of its most interesting and consequential operations

Rethinking Repair by Steven Jackson

Even if archivists in a particular country were to preserve every record generated throughout the land, they would still have only a sliver of a window into that country’s experience. But of course in practice, this record universum is substantially reduced through deliberate and inadvertent destruction by records creators and managers, leaving a sliver of a sliver from which archivists select what they will preserve. And they do not preserve much.

The Archival Sliver by Vern Harris

The archival record … is best understood as a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of a window into process. It is a fragile thing, an enchanted thing, defined not by its connections to “reality,” but by its open-ended layerings of construction and reconstruction. Far from constituting the solid structure around which imagination can play, it is itself the stuff of imagination.

... more Vern

Image Credits

• http://www.w3.org/Talks/General/TransparencyList.html
• http://www.fotopedia.com/items/flickr-3485479724
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan#mediaviewer/File:Carl_Sagan_-_1980.jpg