FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2025

The digital age is burning out our most precious resources, and the future of the past is at stake. Cultural memory institutions such as libraries and archives have been manipulated in ways that prioritize technological efficiency over sustainable archival practices. This paper critically examines the embodied experiences of archivists in the digitization of sound archives, interrogating how the materiality of digital sound archives intersects with the pressing challenges of digitization, digital sustainability, and digital transformation.

While digital technologies have enabled unprecedented access to sound collections, they have also introduced systemic vulnerabilities, including the obsolescence of formats, reliance on extractive infrastructures, and the erasure of embodied archival knowledge. Through a post-phenomenological lens, this research highlights the materiality and sensory dimensions of digital sound archives embedded in the human-technology relations, revealing how archivists’ interactions with these collections shape digitization, preservation, and interpretation. This paper argues that digital sound archives require sustainable strategies that account for the labour, expertise, and sensory engagements embedded in their daily work.

Drawing on primary material collected from semi-structured interviews with archivists and sound engineers from fieldwork research supported by the British Library’s Unlocking Our Sound Heritage (UOSH) Project network, this study foregrounds the embodied labour of archivists as central to the future of cultural memory. In doing so, it calls for a re-imagining of digital sustainability—one that moves beyond technological determinism to recognize the human, material, and affective dimensions of digital sound preservation.