When reading Book History from the archival record, I found it quite interesting how they were discussing digital archives and books. “D.F. McKenzie reminds us, ‘no book was ever bound by its covers.’ The many other archival records associated with print culture- of authors, publishers, printers, booksellers, policy makers and readers- are part of the ‘bound-less’ history of the book” (Pg. 5). This description of the book and archival history really spoke out to me, because when we had been discussing this in class I had a similar thought. Is anything bound in its original form? All books start somewhere but almost all do not start out bound in its form, all books are boundless. Print culture normalized this idea, when this is not the original form of the book. This affects how we read and interpret an archive, and how something is archived as well. Bode and Osborne discuss an archive as something that is shifting and sorting, something not always defined by form. It is all subjective and selective when sorting through an archive, it’s important to know this in order to appreciate this field. Without any context of archives and what they are, it is hard to fully understand them or appreciate them. I agree with this notion, but at the same time I never thought about this in relation to the book, and how it might affect my reading of something. Bibliographies affect the archive and how it works, and I really did not know how important a bibliography was until this class. It is a quantitative part of book history and archives, I never thought it was that important– until I understood the different definition. Bibliography of a book is a very important part when archiving a book, or understanding it in that context. After the midterm I feel like I really understood this concept, and how it affects your contextualization of a book: the key to archives. It is important to have this perspective or knowledge before reading a book in this archival form, or else you are lost. I found this reading quite interesting when thinking about a book, how to read it, and properly understand its archival form. 

Digital archives is still a concept I’m trying to understand. Because of how broad its terminology is- it could be anything. There is no specific format, context, or content that makes it so- just any electronic document. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around how broad this type of archive is- and how many exist. Digital archives are such a large amount of information and data, which seems like it would make archival more complicated, but it actually makes it easier. It makes bibliographic studies easier to collect, which feels true as my midterm was a lot easier with the access to these archives. I was able to find more historical data about my book, but I can not imagine being the person who had to collect and organize all of that data. With digitalized information more information is accessible, but there is also a larger surplus of information spreading: which in my mind would make collecting archival data more difficult. Really, the concept of digital archives is so broad and vast, that it’s hard for me to wrap my mind around how someone is able to achieve archival digital works/organization.