Passage: An archive's holdings reflect, more than anything else, what its fou…

Shared question

Passage: An archive's holdings reflect, more than anything else, what its founding generation thought was worth preserving. Subsequent generations can correct for this — by acquiring new materials, by reading the existing materials against the grain — but the original choices keep shaping what becomes possible to argue. The shape of the question, in other words, was made before the questioner arrived. The author's main argument is that:

• A.only new materials matter
• B.archives should be destroyed
• C.prior preservation choices constrain what later researchers can ask of an archive
• D.archives are perfectly neutral