<em>Archive </em>focuses on the use and theory of archives and special collections in higher education.

The academic community has invested deeply in the preservation, use, and digitization of materials in special collections. Projects from and with such archives have been executed and continue with great success.  Digitization efforts large and small have freed collections from the bounds of brick and mortar by bringing a wealth of texts and objects into virtual circulation. Teachers and librarians have increasingly emphasized work with original materials for students at all levels as a way to enrich student experience and position students as researchers.  The use of materials in special collections as the objects of scholarly study continues to be a key methodology of humanities disciplines even as new technologies, from data mining to visualizations to chemical analyses of vellum, open up possibilities for what scholars learn from these objects.

Recent archival projects have involved multiple institutions (universities and colleges, independent libraries and archives, and non-profit organizations) and multiple constituencies (including librarians, archivists, undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, university press directors, and information technologists).  Envisioned as a central meeting place for currently disparate and dispersed projects and participants, this journal provides the opportunity to use the common ground of the archive to build conversations among members of the academic community and to bridge institutions.

The presumption guiding most archival projects, whether the use of special collections in an undergraduate research project or a large digital project, is that the encounter between scholar and object enriches all participants, and that better learning and scholarship is produced when more people have greater access to “original materials, whether they be analog, digital surrogates, or born-digital.  Yet, what the positive result is, exactly, is often anecdotal: increased student interest, a new focus for a dissertation, a new treasure uncovered.  How projects enable a generative encounter between archival object and human consciousness is an open question.  Indeed, we don’t fully know what kinds of generative encounters are being facilitated by these contacts, let alone how to share, scale, and build from them.  What the nature of our ongoing investment in archives and special collections is, and how best to enact it, demands that we aggregate our experiences, resources, and knowledge to address these fundamental questions.  We propose, as a community widely dispersed among academic positions and institutions, to study the scholarly life of archives in all of its richness.  This postulate lays the groundwork for <em>Archive</em>.