Preserving Memory by Moonlight, Ensuring Access by Daylight

[aminaas1576]

I made my first digital archive on a Windows PC in my parents’ bedroom.

I was a young fan of the Japanese anime Sailor Moon. My introduction to the show was through the English dubbed version that aired on Cartoon Network and an elementary school friend who supplied me with her copies of the translated manga. When I learned there was a dedicated online community with an extensive network of fan-made websites, filled with page after page of images, gifs and content I had never seen, my life changed.


I’d spend hours after school scouring fan-made Sailor Moon websites – not because there were that many I actually knew of, but because the image-heavy pages took several minutes to load. I quickly learned how phone number library to save files to my parent’s computer and began pasting downloaded images into a Microsoft Paint file. I didn’t know anything about building or publishing a website, and my computer skills were limited as a kid experiencing computers and the internet for the first time. All I knew was Internet Explorer, MS Paint, and Solitaire.


I’m not really sure why I felt compelled to download anything I found on the internet instead of just revisiting websites when I wanted to. Perhaps I didn’t want to spend another ten minutes waiting for the pages to load again. But in my child mind, I probably also saw saving an image as making it more tangible, that the files somehow belonged to me now. And, in a way, they did – I could edit, cut, paste, and print them out as much as my parents’ printer ink budget would allow. As long as I remembered to save the images, I didn’t have to worry about them disappearing one day.