About

The Archival Technologies Lab is a space for doing information work towards justice; environmental, social and legal.

The Archival Technologies Lab is a site for the creation and practice of, research into and teaching about the technologies that enable the archival and are themselves archival. ‘Archival’ is understood as pertaining to practices and objects that inscribe, fix and transmit information across time and space. ‘Technology’ is understood as techniques, processes, and know-how, as well as machines and devices. 

In scope for us are such activities as: agitating for the openness of any system that decides things for or about us; finding tools for communities that want to retrieve their data from analog media; writing new histories for the devices and concepts that have shaped archival operations in society; sharing information about how hardware works; etc.

ATL’s work is informed by an ethos of redistribution, both of information and material resources. Huge volumes of information are locked up in technical jargon, paywalls and expensive books often built on unpaid and unacknowledged labor and care. ATL promotes praxis that frees that information. We also know that expertise is embodied in and remembered by people and communities, and ATL makes space (physical and virtual) for our communities to share in safe ways. 

The Archival Technologies Lab is based in the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at Queens College, City University of New York, on unceded land.