Saving our history, before it’s too late

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/03/2024 (611 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Provincial Auditor General Tyson Shtykalo has just released a powerful report on the Archives of Manitoba. The archives is a provincial government agency, mandated by the Archives and Recordkeeping Act to be the repository of provincial government records of lasting value, the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, and non-governmental archives of Manitobans.

These records occupy about 50 kilometres of shelf space. The largest portion of them by far is the records of the provincial government, from cabinet minutes to day-to-day correspondence between government officials and with Manitobans on the many issues the government deals with. These government and other records are the property of the people of Manitoba. The provincial government is their steward.

The archives is one of the best in Canada. It has done world-leading work with non-digital records. Our ability over the long term to have information resources for innovative economic and cultural activity, holding governments to account, administering them well, and sustaining informed democratic public life depends on the archives of Manitoba.

As the auditor general points out, however, the archival record of the digital age is missing from the archives’ holdings: “In an increasingly digital society, the archives must also acquire and protect digital records. Unfortunately, we found that the archives did not have the capability to acquire, protect, preserve and provide access to the digital archival record. These records are currently retained by government departments and agencies, making them inaccessible through the Archives.”

The government is disregarding the obligation mandated by the archives and record-keeping law to archive these digital records at the archives. Provincial governments have long ignored this requirement. Archivists have futilely warned about this looming problem from the beginning of the digital era.

The archives cannot deal with it alone. It requires a whole of government response.

Digital records, unlike non-digital ones, cannot be left in a box or attic or tossed into a warehouse for years until entering the archives.

Leaving them in government departments is a recipe for ongoing neglect, as these agencies have neither the mandate to archive the records, nor knowledge of how to do so to make them accessible.

If left long enough solely in agency custody, technological change, obsolescence, and digital decay will take over and the public’s archive will continue to melt away. The agencies do, however, have a key role to play in collaborating with the archives to ensure that the digital evidence public servants create is protected in their record-keeping systems from the moment of the records’ creation through to their transfer to the archives.

The auditor’s report shows that we now face a critical moment.

Will we have a digital provincial public archives, or continue down the road to its oblivion? The provincial government must invest in the staff and technological infrastructure required by the archives to perform its legal mandate for digital government records under the Archives and Recordkeeping Act.

Governments have long beggared the archives, which today has a paltry $2 million annual budget. The non-government Hudson’s Bay Company Foundation adds $700,000 to that for the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, which is hardly enough itself for that archive, listed among the world’s most important in UNESCO’s Memory of the World register. And foundation funding depends on the vagaries of interest rates, which have been very low for many years.

The Manitoba government’s records are the single most valuable and voluminous source of information about Manitoba. The auditor’s report must spur greater government and wider public understanding of the importance of digital archives.

Failure to do so undermines the many major social and economic concerns of Manitobans that involve access to our provincial archives’ records.

The value of archival records to Manitobans will only increase, as the recent extraordinary trend in uses of non-digital archives worldwide indicates.

In addition to their familiar educational uses, archives around the world are now being used in an array of new ways: medical, scientific, and environmental research, urban and architectural renewal, and in film, radio, and television productions, the news media, podcasts, websites, literary and artistic work, book publishing, tourism, the entertainment and even the video game industry. Archival records have made possible the explosion of interest in family history and the work of museums such as the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

Archives have been used as never before in a host of social justice issues, such as redress for the internment of Japanese Canadians in the Second World War and Ukrainian Canadians in the First World War, for discrimination against LGBTTQ+ people, and in the Chinese Head Tax policy of over a century ago.

The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba is creating one of the largest digital archives in the country to ensure that memory of residential schools is a powerful force for a more equitable relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Preservation of this digital archives is vital to meeting our most important social challenge.

The centre’s work shows that digital records are even more useful than non-digital ones because online technologies make digital public archives a far more accessible reusable resource than archives have ever been. Successive provincial governments’ failure to create a digital archives at the Archives of Manitoba seriously threatens Manitoba’s ability to thrive in the digital age. Manitobans, whatever their political stripe, can surely now unite to achieve this goal.

Tom Nesmith is professor emeritus, archival studies at the department of history, University of Manitoba.