[1]I will not distinguish between group, organizational, and community memories in this paper unless the level of analysis is critical to the argument. I will use the term "organizational memory" to denote all types of memories unless the distinction is important.

[2]I use "persistence" in the computer science denotation where it refers to maintenance of data, often objects, between sessions or uses. In this context, "persistence" implies that the knowledge does not go away, but remains somewhere, waiting to be used again. This meaning is not the same as in information science, which uses a meaning similar to that in the dictionary. This latter meaning is synonymous with perserverance, that is, existing despite active opposition. No agency or active effort is necessarily implied in the computer science meaning of "persistence".

[3]As Graham[17] among many others point out, there is a reconstruction and reinterpretation of the past for the elucidation of the present by both historians and organizational members. As a digression, this suggests that organizational members serve as "lay" historians to borrow Callon's [10] term. The difference would be in the additional training a historian has in a specific form of observation, just as the difference between Callon's engineer and a sociologist lies in additional training and sensitivity to sociological phenomena.