Porous Archives, Different Silences National Memory, Transnational Infrastructure, and the Scribes Project
This presentation examines the Scribes project, a partnership between Library and Archives Canada and the Internet Archive to digitize up to 80,000 out-of-copyright Canadian publications. It compares the two institutions’ mandates and sustainability models, arguing that their different logics produce different archival silences. Using Scribes as a case study, the paper highlights the porous relationship between national memory and transnational digital infrastructure. Presented at the IIPC General Assembly and Web Archiving Conference held on April 20-23, 2026 in Brusells, Belgium.