Charity Scribner (2005) _Requiem For Communism_ Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 

Memory has a shifting understanding and is clearly more complex than in living memory. In the technological lexicon, it applies to: RAM (random-access memory) where programs are created, loaded and run, in temporary storage. Whether these are written to hard memory, into the computer's hard drive becomes a useful analogy to the ways in which working memory is written and more specifically how collective memory is produced. Clearly all sorts of temporarily stored memories are deleted. History is full of such examples.

The archive too, as an institution of memory, resonates in such descriptions. The term itself has uncomfortable associations: its roots are from 'arkhein', both 'to begin' and also 'to rule' or 'to command' (the roots are partly what Derrida's _Archive Fever_ refers to). Charity Scribner highlights the differences between archive 9a beginning, and rule-based system) and museum (that looks backwards) by invoking the distinction between collective memory and history in the work of Maurice Halbwachs (in his book 'On Collective Memory' of 1922) in which there is a perceived dividing line between internal and external knowledge. Memory multiplies and disperses as it flows as part of the collective experience, whereas history pretends that memory can be fixed, and that it can be distributed intact from one point in time to another and one one place to another. 
'If history is a monument that calcifies lived experience, memory is a condition. If history records, memory responds.' (2005: 37). 

What is important about the conception of collective memory in Halbwachs, and different from what Henri Bergson presents in _Matter and Memory_ (wherein memory is imprinted in the unconscious but with total retrieval a possibility), is that memory is scattered unevenly (engaging both remembering and forgetting) and its meanings can only come into being through social context and communication. As such memory can only exist as a work in progress which is in flux and exists as part of collective experience (and in this sense comes close to a form of curatorial practice).