This book contains essays that explore the importance of archives as artifacts of culture. As sites of documentary preservation rooted in various national and social contexts, archives help define for individuals, communities, and states what is both knowable and known about their pasts. As places of uncovering, archives help create and recreate social memory. By assigning the prerogatives of record keepers to the archivist, whose acquisition policies, finding aids, and various institutionalized predilections mediate between scholarship and information, archives produce knowledge, legitimize political systems, and construct identities. In the broadest sense, archives embody artifacts of culture that endure as signifiers of who we are, and why. Thus, the essays in "Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory" conceive of archives, not simply as historical repositories, but also as a complex of structures, processes, and epistemologies situated at a critical point of the intersection between scholarship, cultural practices, politics, and technologies, and as such, the book will appeal to archivists and historians alike.