This paper aims to explore the opportunities and challenges that immersive virtual reality (VR) technologies pose for archival theory and practice.,This conceptual paper reviews research on VR adoption in information institutions and the preservation challenges of VR to identify ways in which VR has the potential to disrupt existing archival theory and practice.,Existing archival approaches are found to be disrupted by the multi-layered structural characteristics of VR, the part–whole relationships between the technological elements of VR environments and the three-dimensional content they contain and the immersive, experiential nature of VR experiences. This paper argues that drawing on perspectives from phenomenology and digital materiality is helpful for addressing the preservation challenges of VR.,The findings extend conceptualizations of preservation by identifying gaps in existing preservation approaches to VR and stressing the importance of “experience” as a central element of archival practice and by emphasizing the embodied dimensions of interpreting archival records and the multiple scales of materiality that archival researchers and practitioners should consider to preserve VR.,These findings provide guidance for digital curators and preservationists by outlining the current thinking on VR preservation and the impact of VR on digital preservation strategies.,This paper gives new insight into VR as an emerging area of concern to digital curation and preservation and expands archival thinking with new conceptualizations that disrupt existing paradigms.

中文翻译：

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存档经验：探索保护虚拟现实的挑战

本文旨在探讨沉浸式虚拟现实（VR）技术为档案理论和实践带来的机遇和挑战。本概念性论文回顾了信息机构采用VR的研究以及VR的保存挑战，以找出VR具有以下特点的方式：潜在的破坏现有归档理论和实践的方法。现有的归档方法被VR的多层结构特征，VR环境的技术要素与其所包含的三维内容以及虚拟现实体验的身临其境的体验性质。本文认为，从现象学和数字重要性的角度出发，有助于解决VR的保存挑战。