The New Political Communication Unit will host an invite-only workshop on 14 April 2015 on the theme, The End of the Material Archive? The workshop stems from Andrew Hoskins' ongoing project Archives of War funded by the AHRC.

The workshop is intended as a provocation to address the challenges of dealing with the transformations in scale and complexity of records with the transition to the digital and how this might shape future history.

Key issues include:

The technological, security and general resource issues of handling digital records.

The impact of the loss of the subliminal context of paper on how records are searched, found, lost.

The cultural devaluation of paper (and its worth for retention) in light of the digital move.

Changing Military/Government/Public/National Archive expectations on what should be accessible to them and how and when.

The impact of the shift from the 30 to the 20 year rule in shaping the above.

The day features presentations from the Historical Branch (Army), The National Archive, and scholars Michael Moss (Northumbria), Elizabeth Shepherd (UCL), Catherine Moriarty (Brighton) and Debra Ramsey (Glasgow).