The word file is generally used to designate to that place whose purpose is to collection and preservation of documents, usually produced in another place and as a result of the concretion of their respective activities, which can be, as I said, documents, books, old newspaper clippings, among others and which obviously are of vital importance when trying to dive in the identity and the historical reconstruction of a nation for example.
Also, these places are usually a place of systematic and recurrent consultation by historians, scholars of certain aspects and benefits of the past and primary, secondary or university students who are sent by their teachers to make contact with these types of places and They are accustomed to using them as consultation methods when carrying out special tasks. Thus, libraries are the great repositories of archives of the last centuries.
Meanwhile, and not escaping the rigors of polysemy, the word archive is also used to refer to the documentary collection itself.
Before I commented on the scope of the term, more than anything, relating it to the historical edge of a country, however, a person, a company, a sanatorium, a hospital and the different organizations that exist usually have a file in which they dump all their activity. The General Archives of the different nations preserve unique information in relation to the historical and cultural life of their peoples and are part of the true heritage of those states.
Obviously, this question must be carried out following strict organizational criteria so that when the time comes to search for a specific material it is easy to detect it; for example, in the case of a hospital to easily find the medical history of a patient if the need arises for an interconsultation or, in the case of a legal office, the file of a case in which it was intervened. Likewise, a correct system of classification of the archives of a hospital or sanatorium is the only way to generate adequate scientific studies of methodological quality, a fact that characterizes the health systems of first world nations.
However, and as a consequence of the growing presence of technology in our lives and in our days, in recent years another type of file has been imposed: the computer file, which is also a set of information or documents but what will change is The storage medium that will no longer be a visible physical place, but one that can be read through a computer, the most common are floppy disks, compact discs (CDs) or pendrives. However, these files, despite being intangible, occupy a space or "weight" quantified in the amount of information they contain (bytes or their multiples). Therefore, they significantly reduce the space destined for the inventory of books, bibliorates or other structures, although the progressive accumulation of digital elements will sooner or later also form a large space to be reduced. In this sense, the Internet has become the great library of contemporary times, with the possibility of storing files online and minimizing and unexpectedly reducing the need for real space on personal systems.
Therefore, the concept of the archive occupies many possible alternatives for the current mentality, in which the tradition of ancient libraries is interwoven with the fast actuality of computer resources. In any case, it is clear that the final idea of a source of information has not abandoned the idea of archives throughout the history of humanity, its culture and its development.
