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Reading Jeremy Blake: Issues of Preservation and Access to Born-Digital Artists’ Archives in a Multi-Institutional Context Joseph Gallucci MIAP 2010 Advisor: Linda Tadic 11 May 2011 I. Introduction On March 16, 2010, the New York Times published an article in its Arts section by Patricia Cohen that posed the following dilemma to its readers: “Imagine having a record but no record player.” The statement comes in the context of Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library’s acquisition of the author Salman Rushdie’s archives, which includes four Apple computers, along with several floppy disks, compact discs and hard drives. Few libraries have, as of the writing of this paper, attempted preservation of born-digital files, and many in the archival community met the announcement of this acquisition of unique digital materials created by a major literary voice with a degree of both excitement and trepidation. The article calls attention to the vast difficulties that libraries and other collecting institutions encounter when dealing with “born-digital” files (that is, documents whose entire existence has been encoded into the zeroes and ones that comprise digital information). While it is tempting to think that the encoding of analog materials into a digital form ensures both those materials’ longevity and accessibility, the digital domain is rife with problems with which many archivists are currently struggling. In many instances, a file may still technically exist, but the associated hardware and software required to access that file may no longer be available or functional. Part of the problem with instituting a digital preservation strategy for archives is that even the most basic digital object enjoys a tripartite existence. Kenneth Thibodeau, in his 2002 summation of the state of digital preservation across the world, outlined three characteristics intrinsic to all digital objects: they are physical objects, or “signs inscribed onto a