Archive and Experience Ashish Rajadhyaksha Abstract This paper argues for anew understanding of the purposes of an archive in the public domain. Alongside the dense cultural issues involved, often emanating from the profound local value of the material being preserved, there is the further problem of making this material available for research and teaching. It is suggested that acategory distinction be made between the collection - often the by-product ofresearch itself - the catalogue, and the archive. In arguing for arecognition ofthe complexity of an archive in its full sense, the essay locates the problem within the twin processes of providing researchable data and new pedagogic structures. Itargues for anew distinction between the database, the pedagogic middleware grid, and the 'new classroom' orintelligibility structure that may well constitute the new location for what used tobe called research. The relation of collective memory to the archive may be seen as evolving two opposed faces. On the one hand, the newer forms of electronic archiving restore the deep link of the archive to popular memory and its practices, returning to the non-official actor the capability to choose the way in which traces and documents shall be formed into archives, whether atthe level ofthe family, the neighbourhood, the community or other sorts of groupings outside the demography of the state. On the other hand, the electronic archive, by allowing the formation ofnew prosthetic socialities, denaturalises the relationship of memory and the archive, making the (interactive) archive the basis of collective memory, rather than leaving memory as the substrate which guarantees the ethical value of the archive. Weare thus entering an era in which collecti ve memory and the archivehave mutually formative possibilities, thus allowing new traffic across the gap between the internalities and externalities of collective memory. The archive, as an institution, is surely a site of memory. But as a tool, it is an instrument for the refinement of desire. Seen from the collective point of view, and keeping the sociality of memory and the imagination in mind, CURRENT WRITING 18(2) 20061SSN 1013-929X 74