As the actors live within particular social and cultural contexts, they must be influenced by those contexts, which in turn at least indirectly affect the selection criteria. Archive artifacts are typically meant for reference by an audience sometime in an undefined future, which could be a week after an artifact joined the collection to many years later to perhaps never. Time capsule artifacts are also meant for future audiences but are usually targeted to be referenced after a certain number of years. Unfortunately, as most time capsules are buried, they are also often lost or forgotten. An important way archives and time capsules differ, however, is their relationship to the temporal dimension.
Archives exist across time, whereas time capsules exist as an encapsulization of a point in time.
Archives are collections of objects which tend to grow and evolve over time, and people may refer to those items once or multiple times. Time capsules, on the other hand, are like amber. The collection is static and set aside someplace so as to not be contaminated with content changes until the time it is set to be opened. The objects chosen for the collection only make sense in the social and cultural contexts of the slice of time in which they were collected. And perhaps more so than in archives, the selection criteria itself takes on greater significance as the future audience tries to comprehend the reasons the people of that time chose that particular set of items as representative of the past.