Liz Timbs, Michigan State University
is an imagined political community…imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members…yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.
Digital collections…act as simulacra of national identities. These identities, fragmented and contested as they may be, are constituted through the collective memories that are stored in memory institutions like libraries and museums. In the material world, these identities are constructed through the porous archival processes of collection development. This is mirrored in the creation of online collections.