The Association of American Publishers has awarded the book “Archiving Machines: From Punch Cards to Platforms“—written by Associate Professor of Library and Information Science Amelia Acker and published by MIT Press on November 11, 2025—a PROSE Award, naming it the winner in the Computing and Information Sciences category. This year’s PROSE Awards are part of the 2026 awards cycle, which honors outstanding professional and scholarly works published in 2025.
“I’m so grateful for this honor,” Acker said. “The book comes from years of conversation with archivists, preservationists, computing historians, and technologists. ‘Archiving Machines’ asks readers to look at the data practices we take for granted and see them as political and historical choices that will impact archival access in the near future.”
According to the AAP, “The PROSE Awards, first presented in 1976, recognize professional and scholarly publishers that have made significant advancements in their respective fields of study each year as judged by a multidisciplinary panel of experts.”
As a category winner, Acker’s book now proceeds to consideration for the PROSE Awards for Excellence and the R.R. Hawkins Award, the program’s highest honor. The AAP will announce these winners in the coming weeks.
According to MIT Press, “Archiving Machines” advances understanding of memory, information, and data by tracing how archiving technologies and information cultures have shaped one another. The publisher explains that Acker examines the origins of data archives and the computing processes of storage, exchange, and transmission. MIT Press adds that each chapter introduces data archiving processes tied to the evolution of data sovereignty—from magnetic tape and 1950s timesharing models to the growth of data banks and managed silos in the 1970s and to the file structures and virtual containers that underpin today’s cloud-based services.
“Archiving Machines” is available for Open Access download here.
Through her research, Acker explores the intersection between digital technologies, information infrastructure, and cultural memory in contemporary society. Her interdisciplinary work combines empirical studies, historical case analysis, and theoretical inquiry, often in collaboration with technologists, historians, archivists, librarians, and artists. Her research has been supported with funding from the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the ACM History and Archiving Fellowship.
Learn more about the Library and Information Science Department at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information.
