This text opens the Spring 2026 edition of DeCode, the digital research quarterly published by the Davis Center’s Imperiia Project and edited by historian Paul Vǎdan. The focus this time is archival treasures, with stories from libraries, manuscript collections, and photo exhibits, from Cambridge and Central Asia, from the tsarist past and the present day. Worried about missing the next issue? Your free subscription is just a click away!
No one leaves the archives without a story.
Sure, scholars have a habit of discovering long-forgotten facts and piecing together provocative new understandings of the human experience by wading waist deep in document collections. Archives have something to offer everyone, from the historian to the economist, the property owner to the genealogical researcher, the film enthusiast to the fashion designer. And if we were bold enough to describe a general trajectory for the past century, it would describe an increase in accessibility. It would be a trajectory of openness; of the democratization of knowledge. We know so much more now about past and present because of the archives (and those who create and manage them). We have even begun to cultivate awareness of archival silences and to insist on asking the questions archives cannot answer.
But it is also true that no one leaves without a story because archives are unpredictable places. They are places where favors are traded like currency and infrastructural weaknesses (exploding boilers, for example) and scheduling quirks can reshape research agendas with alarming speed. If you know anyone who has conducted research in an archive, you know someone who has competed in the silent-but-deadly-serious sport of racing for a seat in the reading room. Your friend has mastered the art of navigating endless catalogs without going cross-eyed and can probably even write with a pencil.
This issue of DeCode explores not just the nature and content of the archives but the way they are experienced. Because, in the end, archives are as much about the humans who enter them as they are about the documents they contain. Once you are done reading, go find someone who has worked in an archive and ask for their best story. It won’t disappoint.
Director of Graduate Studies, REECA Program, and Director, Imperiia Project, Davis Center
