The Dangers of Disappearance, the Opportunities of Recovery

This essay considers two archives and their traces: the Banff New Media Institute (BNMI) and the Daniel Langlois Foundation (DLF). Both archives are the product of transitory but significant initiatives in the media arts and digital media context. Both suffered unanticipated project endings due to institutional and human agency and are now in varying stages of recovery and rediscovery. A third personal artistic, cultural, and social history collection - the Sara Diamond Fonds at VIVO Media Art Centre's Crista Dahl Library and Archive - seeks lessons from the endings of those first two archives; administrators of this third archive have developed a dynamic partnership strategy to prevent the same issues that resulted in the disappearance of the BNMI and DLF archives.[1] In the instances of the BNMI and DLF, disappearance has meant the removal from public access. Disappearance has a second meaning in the context of digital media whether online or platform (such as CDs, DVDs)