Location, Location, Location: Archives and Place in Moments of Memorialization

Using the Peabody Essex Museum's Phillips Library as its case study, this essay considers the value placed on maintaining the connection between where an archive is created and where it resides. Environmental and Indigenous histories have called attention to the importance of this connection, as did Salem's nineteenth-century antiquarians. Promising access from anywhere, digitization presents the connection between documentation and location as no longer important, yet place-based epistemologies persist and are reanimated in the face of four-hundredth-anniversary memorialization.