"An archive is not only the 'graveyard' of the relinquishing agency and thus a kind of terminus of all processes that breathe their last there," sums up archival scholar Eckart Henning in his introductory remarks to the handbook on "The Archival Sources".
Rather, an archive is always also a place where things are revived and reconstructed, a fundus in the best sense: a basis on which cultural meaning can be constructed. The archive thus serves the exchange of information within the Organization as well as the exchange of information within society, which is ensured by historical research through the processing of records (Henning 2004, 6).
The sociologist Elena Esposito also points out the functional inseparability of the long-term preservation of records and their accessibility: only when access to archival records is made possible can one really speak of an archive (Esposito 2002, 239).
The archive as a "medium of an end-time present of memories" (Ernst 2002, 39) is thus to be understood constructively with regard to the memory relevance of its lore: Memories are not kept in stored form, but are (re)constructed with the help of the memories. As a repository of information and knowledge content, the archive forms a "reservoir of possible occasions of memory that have not yet been updated" and thus offers "opportunities for reconnection." (Assmann 1999, 409)
LOHMEIER, Christine and PENTZOLD, Christian (eds.), 2022. Handbuch kommunikationswissenschaftliche erinnerungsforschung: grundlagen, arbeitsfelder, perspektiven. Boston: de Gruyter. De Gruyter reference. ISBN 978-3-11-062671-1, p. 308
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An archive is an accumulation of historical records or the physical place they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization's lifetime - wikipedia 
Depósito del Archivo de la Fundación Sierra-Pambley - wikimedia
- wikimedia
Professional archivists and historians generally understand archives to be records that have been naturally and necessarily generated as a product of regular legal, commercial, administrative or social activities. They have been metaphorically defined as "the secretions of an organism", and are distinguished from documents that have been consciously written or created to communicate a particular message to posterity - wikipedia