I produced the digital archive of 10,000 titles of early Japanese television commercials. Some of these commercials contain the elements related to the program. For instance, the cast in the program appears in the commercial, the same setting as the program is used in the commercial, or the commercial is integrated into the opening or the ending of the program. When we extract these commercials from their broadcast context and arrange them in a taxonomic space, the constructed meaning that a viewer at that time would have been experienced is lost. The loss of context can be restored to some degree by supplying textual information but it is almost impossible to do this perfectly. This case suggests that the commercials as they appeared in the flow of broadcasting and the commercials stocked in database cannot be the same semantically. A digital archive is not a transparent box. It alters the meaning of the stored material. We should advance the analysis of such power of the media.