An archive, as defined by Wikipedia, refers to…

…a collection of historical records, and also refers to the location in which these records are kept.^[1]

Archives are made up of records (AKA primary source documents) which have been accumulated over the course of an individual or organization’s lifetime. For example, the archives of an individual may contain letters, papers, photographs, computer files, scrapbooks, financial records, diaries or any other kind of documentary materials created or collected by the individual–regardless of media or format. The archives of an organization (such as a corporation or government), on the other hand, tend to contain different types of records, such as administrative files, business records, memos, official correspondence, meeting minutes, and so on.

So what is a digital archive? Well, see the definition above, just be prepared to re-imagine how we will ultimately preserve, share, and find these “letters, papers, photographs, computer files, scrapbooks, financial records, diaries or any other kind of documentary materials created or collected by the individual.”

Some examples of personal publishing archives (or e-portfolios)

James Farmer

James Farmer Student Project

Roblog

Intertextuality

The Library of Congress Archive

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

The UMW Archive

The UMW Centennial on Flickr

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

The UMW Centennial Blog

Duke University’s Year Look on Flickr

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
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• Blogs
• Wikis

Image Archive

• Flickr

Video Archive

• YouTube

Website Archive

• delicious

The Internet Archive (IA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to maintaining an on-line library and archive of Web and multimedia resources. Located at the Presidio in San Francisco, California, this archive includes “snapshots of the World Wide Web” (archived copies of pages, taken at various points in time), software, movies, books, and audio recordings. To ensure the stability and endurance of the archive, IA is mirrored at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, the only library in the world with a mirror.^[1] The IA makes the collections available at no cost to researchers, historians, and scholars. It is a member of the American Library Association and is officially recognized by the State of California as a library.^[2]

The Internet Archive Blog

The Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine is a digital time capsule created by the Internet Archive. It is maintained with content from Alexa Internet. This service allows users to see archived versions of web pages across time—what the Archive calls a “three dimensional index.”

 

Snapshots become available 6 to 12 months after they are archived. The frequency of snapshots is variable, so not all updates to tracked web sites are recorded, and intervals of several weeks sometimes occur.

 

As of 2006 the Wayback Machine contained almost 2 petabytes of data and was growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month, a two-thirds increase over the 12 terabytes/month growth rate reported in 2003. Its growth rate eclipses the amount of text contained in the world’s largest libraries, including the Library of Congress. The data is stored on Petabox rack systems manufactured by Capricorn Technologies.^[3]

Using many of the same resources you already do, namely searching, tags, and more traditional ideas of metadata.