After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory is a meaningful contribution to internal discussions about how to orient institutions tasked with stewarding society’s history, archives, and memory. As an information and digital history leader, Trevor Owens invites fellow decision-makers to reassess the expectations and potential of their organizations in the digital present. Owens identifies the technology sector’s principle of “disruption” as one force impacting cultural memory work in the past fifty years. Although approaching the topic from the perspective of a collecting-institution, Owens uses a broad interpretation of what cultural memory work is and where cultural memory work takes place. After Disruption is a guide to recognizing where the Silicon Valley language of disruption—intentionally or latently—has seeped into the cultural memory field’s daily planning. Beyond a diagnosis, the book is a call for professionals to mediate the “impacts and motives” of technology and media in their workplaces by collectively taking...

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