Do Archives Have Value? 9781783303342, 9781783303335

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Do Archives Have Value?

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Every purchase of a Facet book helps to fund CILIP’s advocacy, awareness and accreditation programmes for information professionals.

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Do Archives Have Value?

edited by

Michael Moss and David Thomas

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© This compilation: Michael Moss and David Thomas 2019 The chapters: the contributors 2019 Published by Facet Publishing, 7 Ridgmount Street, London WC1E 7AE www.facetpublishing.co.uk Facet Publishing is wholly owned by CILIP: the Library and Information Association. The editor and authors of the individual chapters assert their moral right to be identified as such in accordance with the terms of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Except as otherwise permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, with the prior permission of the publisher, or, in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of a licence issued by The Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to Facet Publishing, 7 Ridgmount Street, London WC1E 7AE. Every effort has been made to contact the holders of copyright material reproduced in this text, and thanks are due to them for permission to reproduce the material indicated. If there are any queries please contact the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-78330-332-8 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-78330-333-5 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-78330-334-2 (e-book) First published 2019

Text printed on FSC accredited material. Typeset from editors’ files in 11/14pt Palatino Linotype and Frutiger by Flagholme Publishing Services Printed and made in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY.

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Contents

List of tables Contributors

vii ix

Introduction xv Michael Moss and David Thomas 1 Valuing oral and written texts in Malawi 1 Paul Lihoma 2 Building an evidenced-based culture for documentary heritage 17 collections Nancy Bell, Michael Moss and David Thomas 3 Value in fragments: an Australian perspective on 37 re-contextualisation Helen Morgan, Cate O’Neill, Nikki Henningham, Gavan McCarthy and Annelie De Villiers 4 Trusting the records: the Hillsborough football disaster 63 1989 and the work of the Independent Panel 2010–12 Sarah Tyacke 5 Sharing history: coupling the archives and history compilation 75 in Japan Sachiko Morimoto 6 Memories of the future: archives in India 89 Swapan Chakravorty 7 Business archives in Hong Kong: an overview 105 Pui-Tak Lee 8 The search for Ithaca? The value of personal memory 117 in the archive of the digital age Louise Craven

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9

The commercialisation of archives: the impact of online 141 family history sites in the UK David Thomas and Michael Moss 10 A search for truthiness: archival research in a post-truth world 167 Daniel German Index

195

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List of tables

3.1 ‘Return, Reconcile, Renew’ typology of resources (from internal project report) 5.1 Number of archives in the public sector 5.2 Organizations which have archives and an official history 5.3 Relationship between the archives and the history compilation project 7.1 Numbers of companies incorporated in Hong Kong 7.2 Chinese account books deposited in the University of Hong Kong Library 7.3 Comparison of the Chinese Suzhou code and Arabic numbers

53 81 84 84 107 110 111

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Contributors

Nancy Bell has held positions in the museum, library and archive sector, nationally and internationally. For ten years she acted as Head of Collection Care at The National Archives, UK; recently she was a Visiting Scholar, Northumbria University i-School, where she delivered a collaborative project supported by The National Archives, UK. The aim of the project was to understand how documentary heritage collections and services can demonstrate economic, social and public value and enrich people’s lives. She has led heritage science research projects nationally and internationally as she enthusiastically embraces the power of science and technology to better preserve, access and interpret collections. She is currently a Getty Conservation Scholar, USA. Swapan Chakravorty is Rabindranath Tagore Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Presidency University, Kolkata. He has been Professor of English, Jadavpur University, Director General, National Library of India and Secretary and Curator of the Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata. Chakravorty writes in English and Bengali. His books include Society and politics in the plays of Thomas Middleton (Clarendon Press, 1996), Conversations with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (with Suzana Milevska and Tani E. Barlow) (Seagull, 2007) and Bangalir ingreji sahityacharcha (The Study of English Literature by Bengalis, Anustup, 2006). His edited book Mudraner sanskriti o bangla boi (Print Culture and the Bengali Book, Ababhas, 2007) won the Narasingh Das Award of Delhi University in 2009. He was one of the contributory editors of Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (gen. eds), The collected works of Thomas Middleton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008) and Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (gen. eds), Thomas Middleton and early

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modern textual culture (Clarendon Press, 2008). He has edited three volumes on book history in India with Abhijit Gupta, besides contributing to The Oxford companion to the book, 2 vols (Oxford University Press, 2010). Louise Craven is currently a freelance archives researcher and volunteer archivist. She was Head of Cataloguing at The National Archives, UK (TNA) and worked previously for the Open University, the Historical Manuscripts Commission and the Greater London Record Office, now London Metropolitan Archives. She has contributed to conferences concerned with archives and society and has published on a variety of archival and historical topics. In 2008 she edited a collection of essays What are archives? published by Ashgate. In 2012 she presented a paper on ‘The creation of the archival heritage of the 21st century’ to the Brazilian Archives Conference in Rio de Janeiro. Most recently, she contributed to a conference on Archives in the Post-truth Era organized by the University of Northumbria in October 2017. Annelie De Villiers has worked as an Assistant Research Archivist at the University of Melbourne’s eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC) since 2014. Annelie is a PhD candidate at Monash University and has partnered with the Kimberley Aboriginal Law and Culture Centre for her PhD. In 2018 she received a grant from the International Council on Archives’ Programme Commission to lead the Information and Knowledge Management in Indigenous Cultural Centres of the Pacific project. Daniel German works at Library and Archives Canada. He joined Canada’s national archives in 1992. Since that time he has applied Freedom of Information and Privacy legislation to the archival record of the Canadian Federal Government and has helped to organize the political papers of former politicians (including those of several former Prime Ministers), prior to, in 2002, becoming an archivist dealing with Government records. For the last few years he has been the senior archivist responsible for the archival records of Canada’s Federal Security and Intelligence agencies. Nikki Henningham is a feminist historian who specialises in oral history and writing the lives of the living for publication online. She

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has undertaken many oral history projects for the National Library of Australia’s Oral History and Folklore Branch. She is co-editor of the Australian Women’s Register, a position she has held since 2003, and has written more than a thousand entries for the Register. She received the National Archives of Australia’s Ian McLean award in 2005 for her work in locating records relating to the experience of migrant women in Australia. Pui-Tak Lee is currently Special Term Distinguished Professor at the Academy of Asian Studies, Central China University and Honorary Professor at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, The University of Hong Kong. His research interest is the business and economic history of China and colonial Hong Kong. He is preparing a book manuscript on bankers and banking business in modern China. Paul Lihoma is Director of the National Archives of Malawi. He is president of the Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives (ESARBICA) and board member of the International Council on Archives (ICA). Between 2008 and 2014 he sat on the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme’s International Advisory Panel. He holds PhD and MSc degrees in Information Studies from the University of Glasgow. Gavan McCarthy has been Director of the eScholarship Research Centre at the University of Melbourne since 2007, and works in the fields of social and cultural informatics and relational knowledge. A driving aim has been the building of sustainable digital information resources and services to support research. He became a professional member of the Australian Society of Archivists (ASA) in 1985 shortly after his appointment as the archivist founding the Australian Science Archives Project in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in the University of Melbourne. He has been awarded five ASA Mander Jones Awards for publications relating to archival science and contributions to archival practice. He became an active member of the International Council on Archives in 1995, playing various roles in the Section on Universities and Research Organisations and contributing to the development of archival documentation standards, in particular the XML schema, Encoded Archival Context.

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Helen Morgan is a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne’s eScholarship Research Centre. A historian with archival and editing qualifications, she has worked as information architect and exhibition designer on the Australian Women’s Archives Project since its inception and is co-editor of the Australian Women’s Register. Helen is a board member and director of Her Place Women’s Museum Australia. She has been an investigator on a number of Australian Research Council funded projects, and through these and her role in the data management and publication of The Encyclopedia of women and leadership in twentieth-century Australia, she has been exploring the collecting and curating of personal, private (archival) and public domain biographical data and its publication online in a climate of waning privacy. She is currently researching a group biography of a 19th-century immigrant family from Cornwall whose story, owing to its calamity, she is tracking mainly through the administrative registers of government archives, legal records and the narrative prejudices of contemporary newspaper accounts. Sachiko Morimoto has been Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo Archives since 2013. She first studied Japanese modern history at Ochanomizu University in Japan up to her MLitt degree and then studied archives administration at the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies, University College London from 1993 to 1994 for her MA degree. She has shaped her career through working for various organizations including local government archives, national research institutions and universities. As well as working as an archivist, she has taught archive management at universities and various training courses. She was one of the editors of the translation of Elizabeth Shepherd and Geoffrey Yeo’s Managing records: a handbook of principles and practice, in 2016. Her other works include topics on description standards, archival education, archival ethics and an introduction and analysis of Australian Series System. Michael Moss is Professor Emeritus of Archival Science at the University of Northumbria. He was previously Research Professor in Archival Studies in the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) at the University of Glasgow, where he directed the Information Management and Preservation MSc

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programme. Prior to being appointed to HATII, he was archivist of the University from 1974 to 2003. He was educated at the University of Oxford and trained in the Bodleian Library. He was Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the e-Scholarship Research Centre at the University of Melbourne in 2015. He was a member of the Lord Chancellor’s Advisory Council on Records and Archives from 2007 to 2015 and a non-executive director of the National Records of Scotland from 2008 to 2018. He researches and writes in the fields of history and the information sciences. His recent publications include: ‘Where have all the files gone, lost in action points every one?’ Journal of Contemporary History, 2012; edited with Barbara Endicott Popovsky, Is the digital different? (Facet Publishing, 2015); and ‘Understanding core business records’, in Alison Turton (ed.) International business records handbook (Routledge, 2017). Cate O’Neill is the National Editor and Research Co-ordinator of the Find & Connect web resource, eScholarship Research Centre, the University of Melbourne. With an educational background in historical studies, Cate has also worked in archives, including at Public Record Office Victoria. Her PhD (2003) explored community archives and memory, working in partnership with the Italian Historical Society. Since 2004 Cate has worked on a number of projects to improve access to records for people affected by the history of the institutionalisation of children in Australia, including the Victorian Koorie Records Taskforce, leading to the award-winning publication ‘Wilam naling: knowing who you are: Improving access to records of the Stolen Generations: a report to the Victorian Government from the Victorian Koorie Records Taskforce’ (2006); the Who Am I? Project (The Archive as Central to Quality Practice for Current and Past Care Leavers, 2008–12) and, since 2011, the Find & Connect web resource. David Thomas is currently a Visiting Professor in the i-School at Northumbria University, United Kingdom. Until 2013 he was Director of Technology at the UK National Archives, where he was responsible for the acquisition and preservation of digital records and websites from government departments, including the development of preservation systems. More recently he has researched and written on the silence of archives – why archives, despite their grandiloquent

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claims and high status, frequently do not contain the information which people might reasonably expect, and co-authored (with Val Johnson and Simon Fowler) Silence in the archive (Facet, 2017). He is currently researching the impact of falsification and fakes on memory institutions. Sarah Tyacke CB, Hon. DLitt, FSA, FRHistS, Distinguished Senior Fellow, School of Advanced Study, University of London and chair of the International Records Management Trust (IRMT). She is also a trustee of the Hakluyt Society and of the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust; also a former chair of the Mount Everest Foundation (MEF). She is present chair of the J. B. Harley Trustees, which funds researchers in the history of cartography, and a director of the journal Imago Mundi (history of cartography). Sarah was Keeper of Public Records and Historical Manuscripts Commissioner for the United Kingdom government and Chief Executive of the National Archives of England and Wales 1992–2005. She was a member of the Independent Hillsborough Panel in 2010–12 which reported to the UK government on the football disaster of 1989. As chair of the reestablished Fund for the International Development of Archives (FIDA) 2010–16 she contributed to the International Council on Archives (ICA) and is now a Fellow of the ICA. Apart from archives, her specialism is map history. In 2010 Sarah was awarded the British Academy’s President’s Medal ‘for signal service to the cause of the humanities and social sciences’.

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Introduction Michael Moss and David Thomas

Introduction It is all too tempting for those of us who live in Europe or one of the Anglophone countries to take a Eurocentric view of archives. The conventional narrative of archives is that they grew up in the 19th century and were associated with the ‘scientific’ or ‘German’ school of history pioneered by Ranke in Germany and Acton in England. In this narrative, the growth of archives meant that historians were able to write a history which was based on records rather than on repeating what had been said in earlier books. The scientific historians drove the antiquarians out of the temple. Although in the West archives are part of the beginning of modernity, elsewhere they were closely connected with the experience of colonialism. In Malawi and India they have played a dual role, both the record of the European settlers, traders and governments and, at the same time, a tool for recording an oral culture and developing national identity. In Japan they have followed a quite different path. There is a long tradition of writing official histories (of companies and organizations and even the nation itself) in that country, and of accumulating a collection of archives to facilitate the writing of history. Unlike in the West, where history followed the archive, in Japan the archive followed the history. The situation in Hong Kong is similar but different to that in Japan. For most of its history as a British colony, Hong Kong was dominated

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by large British companies which developed the habit of collecting archives in order to produce corporate histories and anniversary books. Some of their records are now deposited overseas and, sadly, most of Hong Kong’s public records were destroyed in World War 2. Most Chinese-owned companies were small or medium sized and family owned, and it was not until the 1970s that they began to take an interest in their own culture and heritage and began collecting archives and undertaking research. What seems to be fairly universally true is the ability of archives to right wrongs done by governments to their citizens. In Malawi, the archives were used to secure compensation for people damaged by the regime of Dr Banda; in Australia they were of significant value in the restitution of ancestral human remains and the compensation of children mistreated in children’s homes. In England they were key in providing evidence about the events surrounding the 1989 Hillsborough tragedy when 96 Liverpool football fans were crushed to death at a football match at the Hillsborough ground in Sheffield. The crisis facing archives Globally there is a threat to the funding of local and central archives. Whatever the eventual outcome of Brexit or the next election, the UK government is facing real problems of an ageing population, increasingly expensive medical treatments, declining productivity and a workforce which is worse educated and less skilled than many of its competitors. There is also evidence that people are losing interest in archives. Some, if not all, of these problems apply in other countries too. Countries in the eurozone have experienced a long period of relatively slow growth and may be entering a period of increasing political turmoil. Unlike the situation in 2008, when countries pulled together to get the world out of an economic mess, the divisive politics of Donald Trump will mean that the next economic downturn will not be met with a united global response. Like it or not, the availability of funding for archives and libraries will be under severe pressure over the next ten years, so we need to be able to marshal the best possible arguments for maintaining or increasing funding. In particular, we need to be able to demonstrate the value of archives, in terms both of economics and also their broader

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cultural and evidential worth. We also need to look hard at the existing business model to determine if services could be delivered more effectively and efficiently. We also need to understand why the use of archives appears to have collapsed. The essays in this book cover the different ways of valuing archives, and while it does not offer any simple solutions, it does provide a framework to assist in the development of a case for funding that is not simplistic and draws on several streams of thought and cultural contexts. What we do not talk about is the methods used for estimating the financial value of archives for the purpose of insurance, indemnity or loans. These are very well covered by Freda Matassa (2017). Measuring value Economic value Money is the simplest measure of value. In classical economic theory, money has four functions: as a means of exchange (you can buy things with it), as a store of value (you can hide it under the bed), as a standard of deferred payment (you can figure out what your debts will be worth in the future) and as a measure of value (Jevons, 1875). Because it is a measure of value, it is normal to use cash as the means of valuing cultural institutions. The standard approach to justifying government funding in the UK is social cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and this approach is also used in most Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries and by some international organizations (Bakhshi et al., 2015, 2). CBA assesses the costs of an action, intervention or investment against the benefits that it creates for society. The process requires all impacts – social, economic, environmental, financial etc. to be assessed relative to continuing with what would have happened in the absence of intervention. In order to do this, the costs or benefits of a service should be valued and monetised where possible (HM Treasury, 2018, 5–6). Approaches to achieving this are described below. As we will discover, none of these methods discussed is wholly satisfactory, so some possible alternative approaches will be considered.

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Contingent value The first method is contingent valuation (CV). This is useful where there is no direct charge for a service which is being provided. It is assumed that ‘what would be best for someone is what would best fulfil his (or her) desires’ (Parfit, 1984, 4). Under this account of welfare, CV methods present a hypothetical situation where some element of the cultural institution under study is presented to visitors or the general public, and the respondent is then asked to state their maximum willingness to pay in monetary terms or how much they would accept in compensation if it were to be withdrawn (Bakhshi et al., 2015, 4). Or, to put it simply, a researcher asks a range of punters what they would be willing to pay to use a service and makes calculations on the basis of their responses. It is most useful for measuring services over time: is The National Archives (TNA) more or less valued now than it was 20 years ago? Or for comparing services: should my local council cease to run a library service in my village or in a nearby town? In Oxfordshire, when residents were asked to choose between libraries and social welfare, there was no contest and the libraries shut or were taken over by the community. Case studies So, let us look at an example. In 2015, a team of researchers published a CV study of two institutions – Tate Liverpool and the Natural History Museum (Bakhshi et al., 2015). By asking different questions they were able to investigate the values which people who visited the institutions place on them and also how non-visitors value the institutions, for example the knowledge that others will benefit from them, or pride in the existence of a national institution. There is need for a note of caution, as all museums in the UK, although largely free at the point of entry, have what in marketing terms are called range extensions – in other words, special exhibitions for which admission fees are charged and which are commercially sponsored and often travel to other destinations. It seems highly likely that responses to the survey were influenced by awareness of the prices charged for special exhibitions (Bakhshi et al., 2015, 59). This is an example of what Tversky and Kahneman (1974) called the ‘anchoring bias’.

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In addition, the study looked at the wellbeing valuation model, which takes people’s self-reports of their own wellbeing as a measure of their welfare. The method looks at how experiencing certain events, such as regularly visiting a cultural institution, impacts on people’s quality of life through subjective wellbeing measures. This measure of subjective wellbeing could be, for example, life satisfaction or how happy one feels. An economic value is ascertained by estimating the amount of money that would generate the equivalent impact on their wellbeing (e.g. life satisfaction) as engagement with culture, under the empirically supported assumption that income has a positive effect on measures of subjective wellbeing (Bakhshi et al., 2015, 3–4). The study looked at how much people would be willing to pay to access the Natural History Museum and how much they would be willing to give as a donation to support its work of conservation and research. Perhaps not surprisingly, the willingness of individuals to pay was influenced by their age, income and education levels, as well as the number of times they have visited the museum. Older, richer, better-educated people who visited the museum more often were willing to pay more, as were people who had travelled further to get there. The mean willingness to pay for a single ticket was £6.87 and visitors were willing to give an additional £2.78 to support the research and conservation work of the museum. The visitors also would expect compensation of £6.89 per visit if the museum were to be closed. The researchers argued that these figures are roughly comparable to the prices charged for special exhibitions (Bakhshi et al., 2015, 7, 39–41, 56–9). However, depressingly, this is less than the real money people are willing to pay for football matches – the cheapest annual season ticket for Manchester United Football Club will set you back £532, or roughly £28 per game; tickets for matches in the Football Association or league cups are extra, and season-ticket holders are also obliged to buy these extras. The study also looked at Tate Liverpool, but here it asked only about the willingness of visitors to give a donation to support improvements to the gallery. Eighty per cent showed a willingness to give a donation and the mean of those donations was £10.83. Those from the North West and Scotland, older people, the better-off and those in employment were, not surprisingly, willing to pay the most. Sixty per cent of visitors said they would be willing to

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pay a donation to support Tate Liverpool’s community outreach work. The mean donation was £8 (Bakhshi et al., 2015, 72–6). Criticism The approach has been criticised by some economists, who argue that survey data produce inherently flawed measures of what people value. We learn about value, they argue, only by examining how individuals make real (not hypothetical) choices. In other words, talk is cheap, and only real spending can reveal preferences (Noonan, 2004, 206). This puts the valuation exercise in a bind, because the types of artistic and cultural values of interest are precisely those that people can appreciate without visiting institutions. Family history can be done at home, largely through subscription or pay-as-you-go sites. Although survey methods may be generally inferior, they provide the only direct measure of these non-use values. If we believe that the arts and culture have substantial non-use or external value, then contingent valuation becomes a regrettable necessity in measurement. However, critics like Diamond and Hausman argue that the idea that contingent valuation may be the only measurement tool available for the task does not mean that ‘some number is better than no number’ (Diamond and Hausman, 1994, 45– 64). Clearly, although flawed, this approach has some potential utility for measuring the value of archives; it would require a major survey of archive users which would mean asking them questions with which they are unfamiliar and which, if asked by officials of archives, might raise all sorts of questions. If, for example, TNA asked its users how much they would be willing to pay and have already paid in terms of travel and, possibly, accommodation, then people would naturally assume that charges were about to be imposed. So, such research would probably be best left to the academic community or to external consultants. However, in the face of declining use there is probably no alternative to capturing data that can be used to inform policy options. Economic impact Here we are attempting to measure how much institutions contribute to the economy. We can measure either direct or indirect benefits.

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Direct benefits include spending by the archive on local services, staff wages etc. and they also include the money made if somebody has profited from the material they consulted in the archive – for example, if somebody found a Victorian textile design which they then reproduced for sale. They can also include the costs of buying services elsewhere. There have been a number of attempts to measure the direct economic value of libraries and other cultural institutions in the UK and the USA. Such attempts at valuation of direct benefits are largely unsatisfactory, relying as they do either on contingent valuation (what people say they would be willing to pay) or on measuring what people would have to pay to buy library services on the open market (Yakel et al., 2012, 299–302). Moreover, such studies as exist are largely incompatible, since different measures are used in different surveys and they tend to ignore the fact that people get most of their information these days from the internet at no apparent cost. Indirect benefits are generated through transactions outside the archives and in the local economy. For example, an archive could benefit local businesses when a patron visits a geographic location specifically to use the archival materials but also eats lunch at a nearby restaurant or stays in a local hotel. Indirect benefits can also include the contribution which archives make to cultural heritage more generally, such as a story-telling resource. Research in the USA shows that indirect benefits are much larger than direct benefits; also, the measures are probably more accurate, since they are based on actual cash expenditure. The question ‘How much did you spend on a hotel and a meal in a restaurant?’ or ‘How much did you pay to visit a cultural heritage attraction?’ gives a much more accurate result than the question ‘How much would you be willing to pay to visit TNA?’ Archival examples In the UK, the Public Services Quality Group (now renamed the ARA [Archives and Records Association] National Surveys Group) measures the economic activities of visitors to archives, notably means of transport used and whether they paid for a meal or overnight accommodation. The figures are a bit erratic. In 2007, 9.5% of visitors paid for accommodation; this number had shot up to 30% by 2009 and subsequently gradually fell back to 9% by 2014 and to 7% in 2016.

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Equally, 43% of visitors ate out locally in 2007 and this remained pretty constant until 2014, when it suddenly declined. We are suspicious of these figures, which require further explanation, but they do represent a valuable first attempt.1 A major survey of the economic impact of archives was carried out in the USA and Canada by Elizabeth Yakel, Wendy Duff and others in 2009 and 2010. This was a serious attempt to discover the indirect economic impact of archives, covering 2,500 individuals in the USA and Canada. The researchers looked at how long people spent at the archives, whether they paid for accommodation, whether they ate out and whether they spent money on other cultural activities. . The main findings of the survey were as follows (Yakel et al., 2012, 308–20). • • • • • • • •

Most participants (79% in the USA and 67% in Canada) saw the visit to the archive as the main purpose of their trip. Just over half (57%) were there to do family history. 56% came alone. Another 30% came with one other person. 57% came from the area local to the archives. 83% spent money in conjunction with their visit to the archives. The authors estimated that a conservative average figure for expenditure per visit would be about $50. The figures were in line with spending on visits to other cultural/heritage institutions.

However, Yakel and colleagues noted that genealogists travel less because more material is accessible on the internet, which means that economic benefit is declining rapidly over time as more resources become available. Their conclusion was that the economic value of archives is real, but modest. The real problem with these figures is the ‘substitution effect’. An investment of £N in a new archive might be shown by a simplistic analysis to generate £3N in additional expenditure. However, without careful analysis it is hard to discover how much of this would have been spent in the area anyway. For example, if people say that they visited a café at lunchtime while using the archive, they may have used a café anyway while shopping or visiting another attraction. Much of the claimed expenditure is not really new, it is simply spending which

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would have taken place in other ways or in slightly different locations (Sterngold, 2004, 175). When things go wrong Consider the infamous example of the Mountain Laurel Performing Arts Center, Bushkill, PA, a performing arts and music centre in the mountain country of north eastern Pennsylvania. To help secure government funding the regional development authority that owns the arts centre commissioned an impact analysis to assess the project’s economic benefits. The final and most conservative version of this study predicted that in the five-county region surrounding the centre, its operations and related audience spending would create 1,273 permanent new jobs and produce annual increases of $34.8 million in household income, $82.4 million in economic output and $668,000 in property taxes. For the state as a whole, the study predicted the project would create even larger economic benefits, including $3.3 million annually in state tax revenues. The impact study received much media attention and was successfully used to help gain state and federal funding for the arts centre. However, the Mountain Laurel study used a gross impact analysis that did not distinguish between net additions to regional spending and diversions of spending from substitute uses within the region. But a large proportion of the people who were expected to attend the arts centre’s concerts live in other parts of Pennsylvania, including the Philadelphia and Scranton–Wilkes-Barre metropolitan areas. Consequently, estimates of the arts centre’s impact for the entire state should have excluded the expenditures of these residents from other parts of Pennsylvania. The consequence of this analysis was that the centre was built on the basis of $36 million of state and federal funds. It opened in 2003 but failed to attract sufficient audiences and after several false starts had its final series of concerts in 2012. It is now used for community events and graduation ceremonies for the local high school (Sterngold, 2004, 176–7). Look for forthcoming events on its Facebook page and you read the baleful message ‘The Mount Laurel Poconos Mountain Performing Arts Center does not have any upcoming events’. One could point to several similar instances in the UK, mostly funded by the Lottery. Although the Lottery insists on such predictions when

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making grants, there appears to be little follow-through after an attraction has been funded. A good example is the costly discovery centre in Irvine in the west of Scotland, where the specially constructed drawbridge is a constant reminder of the injudicious investment. Alternative approaches Are there any ways that we can improve the measurement of the economic value of archives? First, more could be done to explore cases where people pay real money for the sorts of services which archives and libraries supply. One obvious example are membership libraries, which charge a subscription for access. The number of membership libraries in the UK is hard to establish, but the Independent Libraries Association has 19 members.2 These do not include the London Library or some learned societies (such as the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society) which have important collections of books. Subscriptions vary quite considerably, from £104 at the Bromley House Library3 to £510 a year at the London Library.4 There are 16 membership libraries in the United States,5 and subscriptions range from $15 at the Maine Charitable Mechanic Association6 to $315 at the Boston Athenaeum.7 Most membership libraries seem to be doing well; according to a 2016 BBC news report, more people have joined such libraries in the UK as public libraries have declined. This can partly be explained by the fact that they are adept at putting on special events.8 Can we find a similar trace for archives? There are few archives which charge for access, but certainly not enough to get a sense of how archives are valued. However, a better measure might be the willingness of family history researchers to pay for access to archival documents via Ancestry, Findmypast and Scotland’s People. An annual subscription to Ancestry costs £140 a year; about 20% of family historians subscribe to this site. A subscription to Findmypast costs £120 a year. Probably about 15% of UK family historians subscribe to both Ancestry and Findmypast, making a total of £260 a year. So, we have a range of values for archives of between £510 (London Library) and £120 (Findmypast) a year for each user. While we are not proposing this as a serious valuation, this sort of approach or something similar might be one way forward as a way of estimating the value of archives, and might appeal to the Treasury.

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Tourism values Research does indicate that users of archives tend to also visit other cultural institutions – galleries and museums – if they are on a day out to visit an archive, and so the contribution of archives to tourism needs to be valued. Scotland is rather ahead of the game in this respect. Visit Scotland, the Scottish national tourist organization, places great emphasis on ancestral tourism and its research has shown9 the following. • • •

Ancestral tourists stay longer than other visitors (an average of 10 nights, compared with 4.5 nights for all visitors to Scotland). Visitors undertaking genealogical activities spend significantly more per day than the average tourist to Scotland. Family history research can take place at any time of year, making it possible to encourage tourism to Scotland in off-peak periods.

Such tourism is, of course, not entirely focused on archives. It embraces walking in ancestors’ footsteps, visiting museums devoted to their occupations (Scotland has museums devoted to fishing, farming, the textile industry, domestic service and the military), as well as visiting major heritage sites. In the end, economic valuations of archives and libraries have their place and, despite some weaknesses, this approach needs to continue to be investigated, since economic valuation is the one thing which the UK Treasury and local government and university financial officers understand. In order to be able to do so, more accurate and nuanced information needs to be collected that is not simply about bed and breakfast and fish and chips, but more sophisticated multipliers. However, economic value is only ever likely to be a small part of the justification for funding an archive. Yakel, Duff and colleagues (2012, 120) explained: In these trying times, making an economic argument to support archives is seductive. Yet, our data show little support for this argument and suggest that archives need better rationales for their support. The survey provides no overwhelming evidence that

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archives have a great economic indirect benefit; while visitors eat, shop, and stay in hotels, the numbers are relatively small compared with figures related to visitors to other cultural organizations. Furthermore, particularly for local visitors, many economists would view these expenditures as ‘substitution effects’ – money that would have already been spent elsewhere in the community. Archives need to identify a means of demonstrating value to society.

As we show in Chapter 2, archives provide social, health, learning and educational benefits. While such benefits are hugely important, the most significant reasons why archives are valuable are their contributions to justice and to narrative. Archives as a source for justice Archives are agencies serving their parent governments and the public to foster accountability. Archives need to seriously argue the case that they play a vital role in government accountability and the rule of law. The rule of law and natural justice cannot be maintained without appropriate evidence, which is precisely what archives provide. Rather than worrying about what visitors spend on meals and hotels, it seems more important for archivists to develop arguments that say that adequate funding is required to support their vital role of ensuring that government carries out its duty of care to its citizens. The chapters by Sarah Tyacke, Helen Morgan and colleagues demonstrate how, in two cases of clear injustice, archives took the centre stage and were instrumental in moving the issues from being about social justice to being judicial. As Sarah Tyacke demonstrates in Chapter 4, if the records of the Hillsborough tragedy had not been preserved, then the full facts about the disaster would not have come to light. Helen Morgan and colleagues make clear in Chapter 3 that the survival (or non-survival) of records relating to care-leavers and to the repatriation of the ancestral remains of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders are essential to establishing social justice, especially for marginalised people. Similarly, Swapan Chakravorty explains in Chapter 6 how the Bangladesh Liberation War e-Archive and the Bangladesh Genocide Archive, which relate to genocide and rapes in former East Pakistan in 1971, are still leading to trials and sentences.

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Unfortunately, the economic measures of value discussed above, and all those discussed elsewhere in the literature or in TNA’s guidance, are about archives as cultural institutions, rather than as institutions that exist to right wrongs. Archives are much more important than that. If you visit the city archives in Rio de Janeiro you are greeted not by a friendly receptionist, but an armed guard in a flak jacket. On enquiry, you will discover that the archive holds the vital police records that are used to prosecute corrupt officials, mobsters and drug dealers. Archives as sources of narratives In addition to their value as sources of justice, archives have huge value as sources for narratives. They enable the creation of narratives about companies and about families or localities. In Chapter 5, Sachiko Morimoto describes how, in Japan, the creation of archives is often intimately linked to, and indeed the consequence of, writing histories of public and private organizations. Similarly, in Chapter 6, Swapan Chakravorty explains how, in the early years of the 20th century, people in Bengal developed an interest in establishing an archive that would piece together their own identity as jati, a word that could mean both race and nation. This was in a period when there was a growing interest in the western archival and historical tradition in India. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, the great Bengali novelist, wrote in 1885 that Bengalis had a past, but not history as discourse, which to us sounds remarkably like something the great Anglo-German historian Lord Acton might have said. One significant example of the narrative value of archives is the use which has been made of archives by the great English country houses. They have been able to transform buildings which are architecturally interesting and are worth a one-time visit into real story houses where visitors can be attracted back, time after time, to learn about different aspects of the history of the house and those who lived in it. The National Trust, for example, has made a major use of such sources to improve the experience of visitors to Stourhead. In 2017, they told the story of Harry Hoare, the heir to the estate who was killed in World War 1. In 2018 they had a feature on the role of the family bank, building a fashionable Palladian villa and the creation of one of

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the most important 18th-century landscape gardens in the country.10 In Yorkshire, the historic houses partnership has made extensive use of documentary sources in its annual exhibitions and this has helped to maintain visitor numbers, despite an increase in shopping as a major leisure activity on Sundays. Visitor attractions at large historic houses need to be constantly refreshed, as the key to viability is repeat visits. Foregrounding archives to do so brings real measurable benefits. Personal identity Equally, archives enable individuals to make sense of their own families. During 2014–18 many Europeans, Americans and citizens of Commonwealth countries remembered their ancestors who served in World War 1. The surviving archives of that period helped some of them to discover the stories behind the tombstones and entries in the Commonwealth War Graves database. Regrettably, in the UK at least, in the 1920s the official records of World War 1 were not regarded as worth preserving and large numbers no longer survive (Fowler, 2017, 10–12). The fundamental significance of narrative for the researcher in archives is set out by Louise Craven in Chapter 8. The individual finds information in the archives and archival sources which enable her or him to piece together a narrative about events in the past. These narratives are fundamental to autobiographical memory; they have meaning, are memorable and can be repeated. This book is a clear demonstration of two things. First, the archival experience is not the same everywhere, it is much more diverse than the Anglo- and Euro-centric views which are found in many archival publications. In Japan, for example, archives were specifically developed as part of projects to write company histories, unlike the western approach, where archives were created and then used by historians. The Chinese approach to creating business records, which is more about networking than western-style balance sheets is also very different. In Africa and the Indian sub-continent, beneath the veneer of colonial rule, there is a long established tradition of keeping memories and records in both oral and textual ways. The book also demonstrates that archives have multiple values. They are, at the same time, a (albeit minor) force for economic growth, a source of memory

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and of national identity and a way of providing tools to enable social injustices to be righted. They are heavily used by family historians seeking to explore their own identities and, to a lesser extent, by scholars seeking to ask historical questions. Archives are both diverse in the way they have been established and offer a different range of values to society. It is in this diversity that their true value can be found. Globalisation of supply chains can only work effectively if we understand the deeply culturally embedded significance of the way records are kept and valued. Contributions In Chapter 1 Paul Lihoma describes how, prior to the arrival of the missionaries, Malawi was exclusively an oral-based society. The arrival of missionaries in the 1860s marked the beginning of literacy in Malawi. Colonial officials recorded oral accounts of tribal information and history in the District Notebooks. These records are the primary and authentic source of information about tribal history because they are the product of the historic encounter between the literate and oral cultures at the dawn of colonisation. Commercial and financial record keeping was introduced into Malawi by the African Lakes Corporation, which traded in Malawi from 1878 to 2004. The most significant development in record keeping was the hut tax, which was introduced in 1891. For the first time, individuals – even those who were illiterate – came to value written documents. This was because the colonial authorities imposed brutal punishments on people who failed to pay the tax. The only way to avoid these was to pay the tax and carefully preserve the written receipts showing that it had been paid. Official government records were first generated in 1891 following the establishment of the colonial administration. Public access to government records more than 60 years old started in 1951. The closure period was reduced to 50 years in 1959. During the period of government of Dr Kamuzu Banda, which was characterised by increasing intolerance of criticism, access to the archives became much harder – researchers had to appear before the president, foreign researchers were banned and only a limited number of research topics were permitted.

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Following the fall of Dr Banda, a National Compensation Tribunal was set up to consider claims by victims of human rights violations under the previous government. The records that the former regime had created in the process of officially carrying out violations turned out to be the instruments through which the oppressed held the oppressors to account for the pain suffered in times past and made them pay for it. The National Archives rendered assistance to many people who had suffered from widespread atrocities under the oneparty regime. Hundreds of personal files of those who had worked in the public service but were dismissed on political grounds were made available for the people concerned to present as evidence of their suffering. In Chapter 2, Nancy Bell and colleagues draw on the findings of a 12-month research project supported by The National Archives (TNA) in London and Northumbria University’s i-School to understand how documentary heritage collections are valued by different stakeholders. Writing in the context of culture and cultural heritage evaluation in the UK over the last three decades, she illustrates how documentary heritage collection services can demonstrate social and economic benefits, thus contributing toward an evidence base to inform organizational practice, as a tool for advocacy and to demonstrate impact. She then argues the need for a multifaceted and cross-sectoral approach to building an evidence base for the documentary heritage sector not as a defence, but to show that documentary heritage matters and needs to be demonstrated and argued for conceptually and tested with real evidence if there is to be a sustainable future for these collections. In Chapter 3 Helen Morgan, Cate O’Neill, Nikki Henningham, Gavan McCarthy and Annelie De Villiers discuss the work of postcustodial archivists and historians based in the University of Melbourne’s eScholarship Research Centre. The Centre’s methodology opens up discussions about archival value beyond the custodians and creators of records. At its core lies the identification and location of records, co-created documentation and the creation of digital knowledge bases in the form of complex networks of people, organisations, objects and archival and bibliographic resources. This is examined through three case studies in the areas of women’s history, the history of children’s institutions and the repatriation of ancestral

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human remains from museum collections and archives to indigenous communities. Through contextual frameworks, archives can be managed in ways that acknowledge their value, especially to marginalised people, and add value to the community. The significance of ‘low value’, fragmentary archival records is discussed alongside consideration of the critical importance of the value of archives as evidence, from the particular (the rights and identity of individuals) to wider social concerns and historical understanding. In Chapter 4 Sarah Tyacke considers the implications for archives and archivists of the Hillsborough Independent Panel, which was established in 2010 to research the events of the 1989 Hillsborough Disaster. The panel focused on the full disclosure of all the documents surrounding the event, and its report overturned the widespread perception that it was the behaviour of the Liverpool fans which had led to the tragedy. Sachiko Morimoto describes the development of archives in Japan in Chapter 5. Unlike the tradition in the West, most Japanese archives were set up as a result of the long-established tradition of producing official histories of government bodies and private companies. The history would be written first and then an archive was established to hold the records which had been accumulated in the process. Although there are many early records in Japan – a large number of which come from Buddhist temples, and some people in Japan were aware of European archives as early as the 1870s – no western-style archives which include provision for public access were established until 1959. The National Archives of Japan was not founded until 1971. Today the two traditions continue, with western-style archives and an ongoing tradition of writing official histories of corporations operating side by side. Senior staff in large corporations greatly value such histories because of their contribution to creating common values and collective memory. The existence of archives will greatly facilitate the writing of official histories. For a successful union of the two, both sides need to demonstrate pride and independence. In Chapter 6 Swapan Chakravorty observes that archives organize past records in order to construct a ‘memory’ for the future. Rulers build archives to block the unpredictable pathways that the memory of colonised peoples might take. In defence of their cultural memory, conquered peoples assemble their own archives. British rulers founded

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official archives in India when local ones were being launched by Indians to piece together their lost histories. The Imperial Library founded by the British in Kolkata in 1891 evolved into a public library in 1903. The move coincided with subjects’ attempts to build archives that would help create their identity as race and nation. In 1891 the Imperial Record Department (IRD) was opened in Kolkata. The IRD was a major means for engineering the ‘history’ of Indians. After independence in 1947, the National Archives of India (NAI) was put in charge of public records. Curating the memory of the future entails concealment. Secretive regimes depend on surveillance and concealed data. Such data serve the cause of redress and reparation once such regimes are overthrown. Chakravorty shows that South Asia has been no exception to this rule. If archives back power, they also help citizens to turn the rules against the rulers. Pui-Tak Lee describes in Chapter 7 how, since the early 20th century, British firms in Hong Kong took a leading role in preserving documents and setting up research units. By contrast, Chinese firms have not been as active as their British counterparts in publishing company histories. It was not until the 1970s that the paradigm shifted, when Chinese firms became more interested in research and publishing. Growing awareness of the importance and value of corporate identity and company heritage led Chinese firms to invest more resources in building company images. Currently, the boom in the listing of Chinese firms on the Hong Kong stock market has created a momentum for looking at the history and culture of Chinese business in Hong Kong. Chinese business is conducted in very different ways from in the West. Chinese business people see capital in a wider context, including human relationship and social networks. They see networks and trust as key to doing business. Records of Chinese businesses reflect this approach; account books, for example, are designed to make it possible to understand the networks woven by commodities, clients and branches rather than by calculating profit or loss. The trust and networking inherent in Chinese business can be seen in the way overseas Chinese send money to their relatives at home. Many do not use conventional banking networks but rely on remittance companies which themselves develop a network of relationships with other companies to enable them to move money around. Once trust is

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established between the customer and the remittance company, then the company can begin to offer a wider range of financial and other services to the customer. In Chapter 8 Louise Craven explores the value of individual memory in the archive of the digital age. She begins by looking at the changes in the function and meaning of memory which have taken place over the centuries. For archivists, memory is a common discursive trope, but without a definition. The major contribution of archivists to debates about memory has been about the collective memory, but in the last two decades there has been a flow of studies about the archive, the individual memory and the collective memory from academics in a number of disciplines outside archives. Their work invites questions about the individual user in the archive and whether she or he is influenced by these new views, about how the personal and the collective memory work for them, and if, in the abundant world of the digital, there is too much information for the individual’s memory to assimilate? As a first step toward any critical assessment, Louise Craven outlines questions which may begin to help us understand how memory helps archive users carry out their work, and enable us to assess the value of individual memory in the digital world. In Chapter 9 David Thomas and Michael Moss discuss the economic impact which the move towards commercial family history websites has had on archival institutions. They describe how the ability to license copies of archival records and make them available online has spawned a multi-billion-dollar industry. The major family history companies provide online access to billions of records and have transformed family history research and the academic investigation of biographical material. This new industry has leveraged millions of dollars of investment into digital archival resources and has generated some income for archives, but arguably not nearly enough, and there are some doubts as to the long-term sustainability of the model. Daniel German’s Chapter 10 reflects his experience within Canada’s Federal archives, as a researcher, an archivist and an analyst applying freedom of information and privacy legislation to the archival record of the Canadian Federal Government. It displays his concerns over the place of archives in a post-truth world and attendant issues with the transition to the digital age. Daniel has discussed some of these issues and concerns in various archival conferences, as well as in print, but

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in this chapter his apprehensions are clear: how will archives cope with the onrushing influx of digital records in such a way as to make it possible to continue to hold government accountable to society. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

http://www.archives.org.uk/what-we-do/archive-surveys.html) https://www.independentlibraries.co.uk/ http://www.bromleyhouse.org/membership http://www.londonlibrary.co.uk/join/join-online http://new.mercantilelibrary.com/membership-libraries-group/ http://www.mainecharitablemechanicassociation.com/membership/ http://www.bostonathenaeum.org/membership/join-or-renew https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-35831853 www.visitscotland.org/business_support/advice_materials/toolkits/ ancestral_tourism_toolkit/about_ancestral_tourism.aspx 10 https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/stourhead

References Bakhshi, H., Fujiwara, D., Lawton, R., Mourato, S. and Dolan, P. (2015) Measuring Economic Value in Cultural Institutions: a report commissioned by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s cultural values project, AHRC. Diamond, P. A. and Hausman, J. A. (1994), Contingent Valuation: is some number better than no number? Journal of Economic Perspectives, 8 (4), 45–64. Jevons, W. S. (1875) Money and the Mechanism of Exchange, D. Appleton and Company. Matassa, F. (2017) Valuing Your Collection, Facet Publishing. Noonan, D. S. (2004) Valuing Arts and Culture: a research agenda for contingent valuation, The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 34 (3), 205–21. Fowler, S. (2017) Enforced Silences. In Thomas, D., Fowler, S. and Johnson, V. (eds), The Silence of the Archive, Facet Publishing, 1–39. HM Treasury (2018) The Green Book: central government guidance on appraisal and evaluation. Parfit, D. (1984) Reasons and Persons, Oxford University Press. Sterngold, A. H. (2004) Do Economic Impact Studies Misrepresent the

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Benefits of Arts and Cultural Organizations?, The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 34 (3), 166–187. Tversky, A. and Kahneman, D. (1974) Judgement under Uncertainty: heuristics and biases, Science, 185 (4157), 1124–31Yakel, E., Duff, W., Tibbo, H., Kriesberg, A. and Cushing, A. (2012) The Economic Impact of Archives: surveys of users of archives in Canada and the United States, American Archivist, 75 (2), 297–325.

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CHAPTER 1 Valuing oral and written texts in Malawi Paul Lihoma

Introduction The arrival of missionaries in the 1860s marked the beginning of literacy in Malawi (formerly Nyasaland). Planters and traders followed after the missionaries before the colonial administration was established in 1891. A large proportion of the country’s historical records therefore comprises records of churches, early planters, traders and both colonial and post-colonial administrations. For many decades, and while preserved in the National Archives of Malawi, these records of continuing value have served different people – those who actually consulted them and those who, interestingly, never consulted them but exerted control over them. It is worth noting that prior to the arrival of the missionaries Malawi was exclusively an oralbased society – and still is, generally. As this chapter will demonstrate, from time immemorial people have ascribed value to both oral and written texts in Malawi, and this has been the case for various reasons. Value of oral and written texts during the pre-colonial era In general, public functions within a tribal society were carried out by the chief, the chief’s councillors, court assessors, village headmen, messengers, initiation teachers and priests. Since all able-bodied men would be called up to fight when war broke out or when a raid had been planned, the men constituting the tribal army would also be

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considered as public servants of the tribal government. Continuity in the native public service was made possible by a succession of new officials to replace those who had retired or died. Mitchell (1951), Wilson (1972) and Phiri (1975) agree that successors to chiefly or ritual titles and senior advisors to chiefs were given formal instructions orally about their duties and responsibilities by their retiring predecessors. The handing- and taking-over briefs between the retiring and incoming officials were not written but oral, and were memorised by the incoming officials. In this way information about various public offices was preserved in the minds of serving public officials and passed on to succeeding generations. Biabaku (in Phiri, 1975), Wilson (1972), Pachai (1972) and Phiri (1975) distinguish between official historical information and general community historical information in the pre-colonial era. These authors appear to agree that the need for the preservation of the former type of information was officially acknowledged. The responsibility for the management of vital public information was placed on such officials as the chief’s councillors, advisors on community matters and shrine officials. In the Ngonde kingdom this responsibility fell to ‘the notables famous for their knowledge of history and custom’ (Wilson, 1972, 139), while the chief’s court historians performed this task among the Ngoni people (Pachai, 1972). Among the Kerebe clan of East Africa, clan members valued an official clan historian more than any other person knowledgeable about the clan’s history. For instance, the clan treated two individuals, Bahitwa and Buyazi, differently. On the one hand, Bahitwa’s position in society was that of the Omwanzuzi (an individual officially recognised by the Kerebe omukama (chief), and therefore by the community, as someone possessing reliable historical information about all Kerebe clans). On the other hand, Buyazi was a member of the royal clan who simply had acquired an interest in the Kerebe history. However, history of the Kerebe clan as told by these two individuals was valued and treated differently by the Kerebe clan (Hartwig, 1974). Through the succession plan of the public officials, as noted above, tribal information and history were preserved from generation to generation. It is thanks to this system that the early European officials were able to compile detailed tribal histories recorded in the District

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Notebooks, by recording oral accounts of the tribal chiefs, councillors, elders and those who were officially recognised by the chiefs as keepers of reliable tribal historical information. In so far as preserving pre-colonial African tribal history is concerned, District Notebooks therefore serve as the primary and authentic source of information because they are the product of the historic encounter between the literate and oral cultures at the dawn of colonisation, as the colonial administrators had to learn the local languages in order to administer effectively. People obtained the general historical information about their tribe through exposure to stories about the heroic deeds of their immediate ancestors (Phiri, 1975, 22) and to the developments during their own time and passed it down to their children who in turn passed it on to successor generations through oral tradition. Some aspects of the tribal history and customs were also learnt by the young people and others from the initiation ceremonies at the chief’s or village headman’s court, where disputes among quarrelling sides were settled, or at special ceremonies such as sacrificial offerings at the communal shrines and such other ceremonies. To obtain general historical information about one’s own tribe, therefore, it was not necessary to have access to written records, since various occasions laden with the information naturally presented themselves. Although this was the case, those who carried out public functions and those close to the chiefs were likely to be more knowledgeable about ‘the development of the royal authority and bureaucratic institutions’ (Phiri, 1975, 11) of their tribal government than the rest of the citizens. The first trading companies As the first commercial company to be established in Malawi in 1878, the African Lakes Corporation (ALC) found itself operating in an environment where trade was based on barter, before the introduction of coinage. Winspear (1960, 48) recalls that the principal items used for the barter trade were cloth (grey calico – from England), salt and soap and that ‘the standard measurement was the fathom (2 yards), which was reckoned as being worth 8d’. The ALC opened stores in many centres throughout the territory and sold the barter items and many others to the natives. Our interest in the interaction through trade

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between the ALC and the natives in Nyasaland lies in the fact that such intercourse, of necessity, generated written records. But who valued those records, and for what reasons? While the barter trade among the natives generated no records, the ALC, a western commercial company, one of whose characteristics was reliance on business records, issued purchase receipts to the people who bought various items from the company’s stores, even if they could not read them. Whereas such purchase receipts may not have meant much to the natives, the counterpart documents were valuable to the store keepers/managers and the ALC company as a whole for accounting and accountability purposes. As the first trading company, the ALC will be remembered for introducing commercial and financial record keeping into Malawi. From 1878 to 2004, when the ALC ceased trading and went into liquidation, the company’s transactions were captured and reflected in the different forms of records that it generated over the 125 or so years of its existence. Although the company’s main offices were in Glasgow, with two others in Edinburgh and London (Powell, 2008), its field offices were thousands of miles away in Malawi, where a considerable volume of records was generated. An examination of part of the ALC’s records, which were gifted to the University of Glasgow’s Archives Services in 2008 by Donald Mackenzie, indicates that the ALC maintained a good record-keeping system. Land purchases and treaty documents From the colonial administrator, Sir Henry Johnston’s report of 1897 (Johnston in Baker, 1962), it is evident that the first planter in Nyasaland arrived in 1875, the second in 1879, the third in 1887 and the fourth in 1888. Others arrived after the Protectorate was declared in 1891. The planters who had arrived before the proclamation of the Protectorate ‘had already acquired large amounts of land’ (Krishnamurthy, 1972) from the native chiefs. As Johnston (in Hanna, 1956, 230) observes, such planters – whom he describes as having ‘arrived in Nyasaland rich only in aspirations and with a small stock of calico and powder and a few cheap guns’ to pay the native chiefs for the vast amounts of land – made treaties with the chiefs by inducing the latter ‘to put [their] marks on a paper conferring vast

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territories and sovereign rights on the needy pioneer[s]’. Each of the parties to such treaties had a copy of the treaty documents. However, it is worth noting that, on one hand, since the native chiefs knew neither writing nor reading, they had no idea of the contents of the documents, and on the other hand, the purchaser of the land had drafted the treaty document himself and could, therefore, legally claim any size of the land as indicated on the document. In these cases, written treaty documents were more valuable to the European planters, the land purchasers, than to the illiterate land sellers, the chiefs. Johnston (Hanna, 1956) cites the case of Henry Brown who presented a falsified document claiming that he had been sold a vaguely defined but most desirable estate in the Mulanje district by a sub-chief. In actual fact, the chief had refused to sell the land to Brown because the land in question had already been transferred to the Crown. Brown had back-dated the treaty document to six months prior to the transfer of the land to the British Crown and put the subchief’s mark, and that of the latter’s brother as a witness, on the document to appear as if the two had indeed authenticated the document. The error was accordingly corrected by Johnston. Besides the planters, the native chiefs also found themselves being asked by the ALC and the missionaries to sign by putting their marks on the documents of land sales between 1861 and 1891. Because documents were an alien tradition to the native chiefs, owing to their inability to comprehend what was written on the documents, it was not unknown for some chiefs to repudiate the treaty documents at a later date. Here we see the introduction of written documents in the form of titles to land in an illiterate society. Such documents were, however, limited to the custodians of the native lands, the chiefs. Importantly, while the documents involved two parties, they served the interests of one party, the authors of the documents, more than the other. Value of written text during the colonial and post-colonial periods The introduction of hut tax in 1891 as a major source of revenue for running the Protectorate resulted from lack of a direct grant-in-aid from the British Treasury and insufficient funds provided by Cecil

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Rhodes (Baker, 1988; Jones, 1964). Since tax collection was one of the preoccupations of the District Officers, the issue of taxation merits mention because tax receipts were generated in the process. At first, the tax receipts were meaningless to illiterate tax payers, but later the tax payers were forced to value them, despite not knowing what was written on them. Although a system of government based on principles and practices of modern administration had been established in an environment whose roots had for centuries been embedded in native tradition and an oral culture, for the colonial administration to succeed in that alien environment, some of its principles and practices ‘had to be twisted from their European forms by the pressures of the tribal society’ (Jones, 1964, 61). When currency in form of coins (shillings and florins) was introduced into the country, it circulated in a few areas in southern Nyasaland owing to its limited supply, and since not everyone could afford to pay the tax in cash, the government devised appropriate mechanisms for receiving the tax in kind at the district offices. Such measures had their own challenges, as Duff (1903, 352) points out. In those days a Government station must have presented very much the appearance of a farmyard; for beside grain, fruit, eggs, and other produce, quantities of livestock were brought in by taxpayers, including many thousands of fowls. These latter were turned wholesale into runs built for their reception, from which naturally many escaped or were stolen while others died from overcrowding and similar causes.

Hut tax receipts After paying his annual hut tax, the tax payer was issued with ‘a hut tax receipt’ (Duff, 1903, 355). Alongside receipts given after purchasing goods from the ALC stores, taxation brought many people into contact with written documents for the first time. The tax receipt, simple as it might have looked, proved so valuable that people, despite their lack of familiarity with any principles of record keeping, adopted elaborate security measures for keeping them, so that they were readily available. The government adopted different methods of punishing tax defaulters, such as burning huts and holding wives and children

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hostage (Palmer, 1972, 306). However, the common method of punishment was compelling the defaulters to work for the government (in Blantyre) for a period of one month, at the rate of three shillings (which was also the annual hut tax) per adult male from the age of 14, later increased to 16 (Duff, 1903; Pretorius, 1972). Observing the maltreatment of the tax defaulters by the government, Dr William H. Murray (in Pretorius, 1972, 370–1), the then head of the Dutch Reformed Church Mission stationed at Mvera, remarked in November 1900: Things have lately taken place that might shame any Savage, if committed by him, and that in the name and by the instruments of the Govt. Because men refuse to pay their taxes (on account of the hardships entailed in going to work 200 miles away from their homes, where there is a great scarcity of food) women and little children have been ruthlessly shot down by native policemen, and we’ve still to see what’s going to become of it.

Upon their return from the forced migrant labour in Blantyre, the tax defaulters were a sorry sight, for they looked like ‘walking skeletons’ (Rev. T. C. B. Vlok in Pretorius, 1972, 371). Not wishing to suffer these traumatic consequences, the natives became ‘well aware that the possession of a hut tax receipt exempted them from requisition as defaulters’ (Duff, 1903, 355). The value of the tax receipt became priceless to the natives. Their dignity, rights, peace and the confidence which could enable them to stay at home and not run away and hide in the mountains and bushes at the sight of government officials were all embedded in the tax receipt. Everything possible was done to pay the tax and keep the tax receipts safely, only producing them when demanded to do so by government agents, who viewed the receipt as the only evidence of the tax having been paid (although tax books contained details of tax payers). Because the natives had seen the terrible consequences of tax evasion, the majority of them faithfully paid their tax, and once they obtained their tax receipts they kept them so safely that one District Officer at the beginning of the 20th century observed that: the number of those who could be legitimately compelled to work, even for the space of a single month in the year, grew smaller and

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smaller, until at last Collectors of districts found themselves placed between Scylla and Charybdis – between a European community clamouring for labour, and a native population who did not wish to work, and who knew themselves to be under no obligation to do so. (Duff, 1903, 355)

Public access to record Official government records were first generated in 1891 following the establishment of the colonial administration in Malawi. Operating under the 60-year rule, public access to government records started in 1951. Until January 1959, when the new 50-year access to public records rule was introduced, the records of the Nyasaland government that could be accessed by researchers were those from 1891 to 1898. Ordinary access Access to public records was either ordinary or special. Through ordinary access to public records, researchers could consult public records that were more than 60 years old. From 1959, the period was reduced by 10 years, which meant that people could have access to public records which were 50 years old or more. All records that had passed the closure period of either 60 or 50 years were freely made accessible to researchers. After 1951, when government records were opened for public access, the Nyasaland Government granted access to all who had applied for access to the government records held in the Regional Archives in Nyasaland, which was later to become the National Archives of Malawi.1 This type of public access to government records was normally straightforward, such that once an application was submitted to the Secretariat, within a short period of time the application was approved and permission to consult the records was granted to the applicant. Special access The second type, special access to government records, involved access to records that were within the closure period of 50 years. The process of accessing this type of records was a long one. A researcher had to

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submit an application specifying the records to be accessed and the reasons for accessing them. The application was submitted to the Records Committee, which scrutinised it. The Records Committee in turn forwarded the application to the Chief Secretary together with its recommendations. If he so wished, the Chief Secretary would then obtain the permission of the Colonial Office in London, following instructions of the Secretary of State for the Colonies to the Governor in Nyasaland in 1958. When the closure period was 60 years, the Colonial Office advised the Nyasaland Depot of the then Central African Archives on the mechanics of granting special access to records that had not yet attained the 60-year period. Once the Colonial Office had sanctioned access to government records of a later date, the following was the procedure: (a) The Responsible Officer of a Department dealing with the subject was to scrutinise the material in question. (b) If the material asked for was too extensive, a bar was to be imposed. In this case, the request was to be considered further only if it was of such outstanding importance as either to justify the Department allocating an officer for whatever time the scrutiny would take or to justify recognising the enquiry as ‘officially sponsored’ and providing always that the researcher was personally accepted.2 Once special access was granted, and before the material was consulted, the Colonial Office instructed that the researcher was to sign an undertaking to obtain official approval before publishing, at any time in the future, any information derived from his privileged access. Staff of the archives assisting the researcher were to ensure that only the approved material was consulted. Between 1951 and 1963, when Europeans were administering Malawi, although only two requests for access to government records that were less than 50 years old were turned down,3 all other requests for special access were granted and all requests for access to records that were older than 50 years were granted.

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Restrictions on access after independence After political independence in July 1964 the situation in the National Archives changed. The Archivist for Malawi, J. D. C. Drew, described the situation in August 1964 as ‘a pity ... [because] Archives [was] no longer the quiet backwater it used to be’.4 For instance, from 1964 the Home Affairs Minister was showing increasing interest in the National Archives, to the extent that some strict conditions for accessing public records were imposed. All records that were within the 50-year rule were now precluded from special access by researchers. This was contrary to the advice of the Secretary of State for the Colonies to the Governor of Nyasaland in 1951 and the practice during the colonial period. Instead, only those records that were more than 50 years old could be accessed. Although this was the case, the government adopted a much stricter line on the inspection and publication of even these records.5 As Dr Kamuzu Banda and his government grew more autocratic and intolerant to any criticism, more control over the archives was exerted than ever before. Between 1964 and 1966, applicants wishing to access public archives were supposed to appear before the Minister of Local Government for interviews. The situation changed in 1966, when the Department of Archives was placed under the Ministry of Home Affairs, because instead of appearing before a minister, research applicants were required to appear before the president himself, and only a very small number were allowed to access the archives between 1966 and 1980. Working in this political environment, the national archivist was forced to please his masters by spying on a few researchers who had been given permission to access government archives. For this reason, a number of researchers whom he reported to the authorities as seemingly having different political views from those of the government were banned from using the archives and deported. Archives closures and banning of foreign researchers From 1965 to 1993, the National Archives was closed on a number of occasions, each of varying duration, for different reasons as the president saw fit and directed accordingly. For instance, the National

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Archives was closed to all research workers on the following dates: between May and July 1965;6 between July and October 1966;7 and between April and September 1972,8 when Mr Drew was away on holiday overseas; for over a period of 20 months between 1967 and 1968; and between June and December 1993, when the president directed closure of the archives. These closures affected researchers and other interested users of the National Archives in different ways. The government further controlled access to the archives by banning all foreign researchers from 1968, after a researcher had published an article which was critical of the Malawi government. This being so, only ‘persons of Malawian origin, a few expatriates (only heads of departments) of the University of Malawi and persons doing research on behalf of the Malawi Government’9 were permitted access to public records in the National Archives. Access to the public records was accorded to these categories of people simply because they were all resident in the country and for this reason they could easily be traced and dealt with if they wrote anything considered subversive. Restrictions on research topics Another way in which the government controlled access to archives was by placing restrictions on research topics. When the National Archives was reopened in 1968 after it had been closed for more than a year, the government put a condition on access to public records. No researcher could be allowed access to the archival material unless he or she could prove that his or her research would make a palpable and significant contribution to the development of the country.10 Only research where the government could make immediate use of the results was permitted. For this reason, research of a purely historical nature was normally not allowed. To ensure that this condition was complied with, all researchers were required to send lists of all the files they wanted to consult for presidential scrutiny and approval. After the approval was granted, the researchers could consult only the files that the president had approved. By closing the archives frequently and limiting researchers to the subjects with which the government was comfortable and demanding lists of individual files which the few approved researchers would consult, the government was actually hiding the archival resources

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from public access and scrutiny. As long as the limitations were in force, the largest proportion of the archives that should have been available for public access remained virtually closed to the public and grossly underutilised. This scenario is one of the reasons that prompted Woods (1990, 259) to argue that ‘the National Archives of Malawi were for all intents and purposes closed from the late 1960s until the early 1980s’. Reparations for human rights violations Three distinct periods marked the peak of human rights violations during the one-party regime in Malawi. These were: between 1964 and 1965, following the Cabinet Crisis, during which hundreds of people were victimised for being thought to be sympathetic to Dr Banda’s critics; between 1969 and 1972, when mostly members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses were rounded up throughout the country and abused, humiliated, tortured, stripped of their jobs and property, had their houses and books burnt and were forced to flee the country; and again during the 1970s after Dr Banda had been declared Life President (Malawi Government, 2005). In order retrospectively to account for the atrocities committed during the one-party era, the Malawi Constitution provided for the establishment of the National Compensation Tribunal (NCT). The objective of the NCT was to ‘entertain claims with respect to alleged criminal and civil liability of the Government of Malawi, which was in power before the appointed day [18 May 2004]’ (Malawi Government, 1994, Section 137). The NCT had a number of options for making reparations to valid claimants. These were in the form of medical care, formal acknowledgement and apology, establishment of memorials, pensions, job retraining, restitution of property, bonds and shares and monetary compensation. Along with the NCT, a National Compensation Fund was established for the exclusive benefit of those applicants to the NCT who had been granted any award, gratuity, pension or other form of reparation according to the principles, procedures and rules of the NCT (Malawi Government, 1994, Section 144 (2) (a)). The National Compensation Fund was to cease to accept new claims for compensation not later than ten years from 18 May 1994 (the date

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when the Constitution came into force). At the end of the ten-year period, the NCT would be dissolved. To achieve its objective, the NCT was given all powers of investigation necessary to establish the facts of any case before it. Between January 1995, when it started receiving claims against the government, and July 2003, when it stopped receiving new claims, the NCT registered 24,363 claimants (Malawi Government, 2005). This number excludes the hundreds of civil servants who were dismissed from the service between 1964 and 1993 on political grounds. Out of this number, 8% received full payments, 40.8% received interim payments, 23% required additional information from the claimants, 1.3% were rejected for lack of documentary evidence and 22.7% were yet to be assessed (Malawi Government, 2005). Accountability for human rights violations committed during the one-party era demonstrated the value of archives to the society which was oppressed by the totalitarian regime. The records that the regime created in the process of officially carrying out violations turned out to be the instruments through which the oppressed held the oppressors accountable for the pain suffered in times past and made them pay for it in order to bring about healing. Furthermore, this accountability has led to the generation of a comprehensive database of the extent of the various atrocities that the post-colonial government committed between 1964 and 1994. The National Archives opened its doors wide and rendered assistance to many people who had suffered from widespread atrocities during the one-party regime. Hundreds of personal files for those who worked in the public service but had been dismissed on political grounds were made available for the people concerned to present as evidence of their suffering, in order to have their claims validated for compensation. People who would have otherwise not visited the National Archives were compelled by circumstances to visit the institution. The political transition to democratic governance in 1993–94 brought about the freedom of the press, which was recognised and mandated in the 1994 Constitution. Due to this freedom, by the end of 1993 there were over 30 independent newspapers (Lwanda, 1993; Kachala, 2003). The emergence of press freedom and the government’s loss of control over information suddenly increased patronage of the National Archives. Although a researcher wishing to consult public archival

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material still has to submit an application for admission to consult the archives, such applications no longer require presidential approval. Instead, the Director of Archives forwards the applications to the ministry responsible for the archives for ministerial approval. Enormous volumes of historical records generated from 1891 onwards that were largely closed to the public between 1964 and 1993 have since been made open and continue to remain so for public consultation. Conclusion From time immemorial, Malawian society has valued text, both oral and written. As there was an absence of literacy during the preEuropean era, the predominantly oral society relied on oral text for both official and general societal purposes. Introduction of business records by churches, societies and government provided the means for capturing evidence of organizational processes, activities and transactions. During the colonial period researchers consulted the archival material to satisfy their various research interests. However, during the post-colonial one-party era, while both the government and the research community saw the value of archives, the government imposed strict measures to control access to information in order to consolidate its autocratic power. By this means the research community, which valued archives as sources of research data and information, was denied access and, arguably, remained powerless in so far as obtaining research data was concerned. When democracy empowered people to enjoy their rights freely, the National Archives, which for 30 years had been controlled by a few, was opened. As a result, many people, the majority of whom had suffered from atrocities and needed to consult various records as evidence of their suffering, as well as journalists and researchers who had all along been denied access to the government archives, were able to access the archives and continue to do so. References Baker, C. (1962) Nyasaland, the History of its Export Trade, The Nyasaland Journal, 15 (1), 7–35. Baker, C. (1988) The Genesis of Nyasaland Civil Service, The Society of

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Malawi Journal, 41 (1), 30–44. Duff, H. L. (1903) Nyasaland under the Foreign Office, George Bell and Sons. Hanna, A. J. (1956), The Beginnings of Nyasaland and North-Eastern Rhodesia 1859-95, Clarendon Press. Hartwig, G. W. (1974) Oral Data and its Historical Function in East Africa, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 7 (6), 468–79. Jones, G. (1964) Britain and Nyasaland, George Allen & Unwin. Kachala, F. C. (2003) Unfolding Events Leading to Political Pluralism in Malawi: drawing lessons from the archives. Paper presented at the XVII ESARBICA General Conference, Maputo, Mozambique, 22–26 July 2003. Krishnamurthy, B. S. (1972) Economic Policy, Land and Labour in Nyasaland, 1890–1914. In Pachai, B. (ed.), The Early History of Malawi, Longman Group Limited. Lwanda, J. L. (1993) Kamuzu Banda of Malawi, 1961–1993: a study in promise, power and paralysis, Dudu Nsomba Publications. Malawi Government (1994) The Constitution of the Republic of Malawi, Government Printer. Malawi Government (2005) Report of the National Compensation Tribunal: 1994-2004, Government Printer. Mitchell, J. C. (1951) An Outline of the Social Structure of Malemia Area, The Nyasaland Journal, 4 (2), 15–47. Pachai, B (1972) Ngoni Politics and Diplomacy in Malawi: 1848–1904. In Pachai, B. (ed.), The Early History of Malawi, Longman Group Limited. Palmer, R. H. (1972) Johnston and Jameson: a comparative study in the imposition of colonial rule. In Pachai, B. (ed.), The Early History of Malawi, Longman Group Limited. Phiri, K. M. (1975) Chewa History in Central Malawi and the Use of Oral Tradition, 1600–1920. PhD thesis, Madison, University of Wisconsin. Powell, D. (2008) African Lakes Corporation Company, Glasgow University Archives Services (unpublished). Pretorius, J. L. (1972) An Introduction to the History of the Dutch Reformed Church Mission in Malawi 1889–1914. In Pachai, B. (ed.), The Early History of Malawi, Longman Group Limited. Wilson, M. (1972) Reflections on the Early History of Malawi. In Pachai, B. (ed.), The Early History of Malawi, Longman Group Ltd. Winspear, F. (1960) Some Reminiscences of Nyasaland, The Nyasaland Journal, 13 (2), 35–74. Woods, T. (1990) Capitaos and Chiefs: oral tradition and colonial society in

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Malawi, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 23 (2), 259–68.

National Archives of Malawi documents cited 1 2

NAM, 18-5-2R/14801, Access to Public Records. NAM, 18-5-2R/14801, Access to Public Records. Instructions from the Colonial Office to the Central African Archives Nyasaland Depot, on the mechanics of special access to public records, 14 May 1951. 3 NAM, 1/5, Access to Public Archives (Communication from the Deputy Archivist to R. A. Hamilton, 10 January 1951, and communication from the Chief Secretary to G. Shepperson, 31 July 1952). In 1951 R. A. Hamilton’s application to consult records that were less than 50 years old in 1951 was rejected by the Chief Secretary, while in 1952, G. Shepperson’s application was also turned down for the same reason as that of R. A. Hamilton. 4 NAM, 18-5-2R/14801, Access to Public Records. Correspondence from the Archivist for Malawi to a researcher Dr J. van Velsen, 4 August 1964. 5 NAM, 18-5-2R/14801, Access to Public Records. Correspondence from the Archivist for Malawi to a researcher Dr J. van Velsen, 2 September 1964. 6 NAM, 1/5, Access to Public Archives. Letter from the K. M. Mtapiko, the Deputy National Archivist to Dr B. S. Krishnamurthy, concerning the closure of the Archives, 31 May 1965. 7 NAM, 1/5, Access to Public Archives. Letter from the Archivist for Malawi to J. McCracken, informing the latter that the Archives would be closed from 1 July to October while the former was away, 4 April 1966. 8 NAM, 1/5, Access to Public Archives. Memo from the Government Archivist to the Prof. B. Pachai, head of the History Department at Chancellor College, informing members of the History Department and any other interested persons about the closure of the Archives, 7 April 1972. 9 NAM, 1/5, Access to Public Archives. Memo from the Local Government Secretary to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Malawi on the access conditions to the National Archives, 17 July 1968. 10 NAM, 1/5, Access to Public Records. J. D. C. Drew (Government Archivist) to H. W. Macmillan, 7 May 1968.

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CHAPTER 2 Building an evidenced-based culture for documentary heritage collections Nancy Bell, Michael Moss and David Thomas

Introduction In his essay ‘The Strange Death of Municipal England’, Tom Crewe presents some sobering facts. Between 2008 and 2018, local authority spending in the UK has been squeezed by 37%, and a further substantial reduction is scheduled up to 2023. For many local councils this will mean the loss of more than 60% of income by 2020 (Crewe, 2016). Further retrenchment of already pinched resources will inevitably focus resources on essential front-line services. Crewe presents a carefully argued narrative based on compelling evidence. The experience in the UK is replicated in many other countries that have large budget deficits in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The consequences of increasing digital access Financial retrenchment in the public sector is just one factor impacting on the sector, which is witnessing a decline in staffing and supposed ‘efficiencies’ to be gained through mergers with other cultural heritage services, such as libraries and museums. The sector has to compete for the ‘leisure pound’ and the increasingly vast amount of heritage assets available on the web, which will continue radically to change how collections are accessed and used by a diverse community of users. In the wake of the digital abundance, new forms of content are added daily, from a variety of sources (Zephoria Digital Marketing, 2019); for example, five new Facebook profiles are added every second, creating

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new pipelines of content for researchers and immersive experiences hitherto unimaginable. In the analogue world historical newspapers were rarely used, but now that they have been digitised and are fully searchable, they are heavily exploited and provide an increasingly alternative channel to the use of archives, at least in the modern period. While this evolving digital offer is to be applauded for giving greater access to collections, there are inevitably unintended consequences. Worryingly, there has been a decline of 3%, over the period 2015–2017 in numbers of on-site visitors to archives, largely from the 65–74 year age group. Although a good deal of the most commonly used digitised content is sheltered behind the paywalls of third-party providers, a similar reduction in online access to collections through archive and library websites has been reported by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (2017). This downward trend is likely to continue as more content becomes available through third-party providers and with the development of more sophisticated search tools that enable interoperability between collections, such as linking genealogical data with digitised newspapers and printed books. The prospect that it will soon be possible to easily digitise and index handwritten documents poses an even greater challenge. There is no magic bullet or quick answer for how to address these changes, although lessons can be learned from other private and public service organizations, such as libraries and museums, and professional bodies which are seeking to exploit the potential of the digital environment (Brettle and Maden, 2016). Against a background of public sector cuts in expenditure and fierce competition, the underlying strategy is to build asset-light businesses with as low a cost base as possible. The consequence is to deliver as much as possible over the internet and reduce fixed costs, such as the high costs of accommodation. By contrast, the cultural heritage sector relies on storerooms, search rooms and exhibition spaces. To justify their retention in this environment a credible evidence base is urgently needed to show who uses heritage assets, what are the drivers for retaining them (for example, compliances and demand) and whether there are alternative ways of delivering services (for example, through outsourcing). There is very little robust data, as Library and Archives Canada has discovered in scoping just such an exercise to justify its strategic development plans, including a new building (Silk, 2018).

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Understanding the value of documentary heritage The National Archives and Northumbria University i-School jointly supported a research project to understand more effectively how to demonstrate the value of documentary heritage and the social and economic impact that can be realised from the services offered. The aims of this 12-month project were to: • • •

provide a narrative for building resilience through better evidence gathering; recommend how evidence is gathered and used to demonstrate the value of documentary heritage collections; highlight the professional culture and political relationships needed to develop an evidence-based culture for the documentary heritage sector.

Context As a starting point it is, perhaps, useful to first situate this work within a broader context of collection value that has emerged in the UK over the last 30 years which could broadly be characterised as a complex relationship between culture, heritage (including memory institutions) and government. Successive UK governments have realigned the relationship of culture and heritage to support public policy agendas to improve the lives of citizens and, significantly, to respond to what have been termed ‘rituals of validation’ (Strathern, 2000, 3), a complex system of benchmarking and reviews that has grown exponentially since the 1980s. The prevailing ‘audit culture’ with its ‘twinned precepts’ of economic efficiency and good practice is now pervasive, and a component in the embedded concepts of new public management (NPM) theory (Strathern, 2000, 8). While the role of government-driven NPM policies for culture and heritage presents an uncomfortable truth and, as many argue, sets private experience in opposition to utilitarian performance, at its heart is the need to set priorities for resource allocation in a very competitive environment which cannot be ignored. This is very unfamiliar territory for many of those in the cultural heritage sector, who have blithely assumed that their assets represent an undeniable ‘public good’.

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Measuring the value of culture Since the early 1980s, there have been many government-supported attempts in the UK to understand and measure the value of culture and cultural heritage; to explore what is valued and why; and, critically, to develop appropriate metrics and mechanisms for capturing the benefits which collecting institutions deliver. A cursory appraisal of three decades of theoretical literature, reports from thinktanks and government policy papers identifies well over 600 published research papers focused on culture and cultural heritage valuation. This is in addition to ongoing empirical academic research in this domain. Yet, despite all this attention, documentary heritage is noticeably absent from the narrative. The reasons would seem to be different funding regimes and differences in mission between museums, libraries and archives. Historically in the UK, archives have not received direct funding from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), nor has the sector had access to evaluation research funding from Arts Council England and its predecessor, the Museum Library and Archive Council (MLA), which has supported the development of value metrics and evaluation for the museum sector over many years. A contributing factor to this lack of attention is the failure of the sector to articulate in a meaningful way the contribution which it makes to the large footfall in museums, galleries and other heritage attractions. The business model of all such institutions depends critically on repeat visits, which means that offerings need to be regularly refreshed with new exhibits supported by compelling narratives that are often based on scholarly archival research. In articulating their function as storehouses of cultural assets, archives have overlooked the implication that they serve as warehouses of the stories that feed the wider cultural heritage sector and, for example, BBC programmes. Not enough effort has been put into garnering the evidence to illustrate how an exhibition that attracts millions of visitors depends on stories drawn from the archives. This can be explained in part by a pernicious silo mentality between museums, libraries and archives that celebrates difference rather than commonality.

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Defining the value of cultural heritage to society The societal benefit of experiencing culture and cultural heritage is a well-rehearsed narrative of social improvement which has prevailed for centuries, and one that continues to be revised in the face of political and social imperatives. A clear voice for leading the political agenda was set in 1946, when the Arts Council was formed in an era of increased opportunity and supported by significantly increased funding. Harold Wilson’s Labour government (1964–70) actively sought to promote national culture as a mechanism for social improvement: ‘access should be central to everyone’s experience and embedded in the educational system’. This explicit departure was set out in Jennie Lee’s 1965 White Paper ‘A Policy for the Arts’, the first of its kind, and set the precedent for a government-funded national agenda for culture and heritage (HM Treasury, 1965). The prevailing policy of ‘access for all’ which was championed during the Labour years sits in sharp contrast with the largely instrumentalist view of the subsequent Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, which questioned why the public should fund culture at all. The Conservative government applied political pressure to make museums less dependent on government. In response to this policy shift, the highly controversial policy of charging entrance fees to museums was introduced in 2001, but not for libraries or archives. The complex relationship between policy and cultural funding evolved under the ‘New’ Labour government led by Tony Blair, with its commitment to taking forward the ‘Modernising Government’ agenda for overall cost reduction, transparency and a return on public investment as well as actively promoting accountability and audit. Publicly funded institutions, including heritage organizations, were similarly scrutinised, and the value of culture and cultural heritage was again reappraised, as were the mechanisms for supporting the very clear role for culture in delivering social policy. Publicly funded libraries, museums and archives were key to delivering change through the Department for National Heritage established in 1992 which became the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in 1997. This policy agenda was promoted by the Culture Secretary, Chris Smith, who actively took up the ‘policy to practice’ baton, campaigning for museums, archives and libraries to play a central role in delivering

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the government’s social inclusion policy agenda through its agencies, such as Re:source and, later, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council in 2003. Smith’s successor as Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport, Tessa Jowell acknowledged ’a lack of convincing language and political argument for how arts and culture are at the heart of society’ (Jowell, 2004). This position was robustly debated amongst professionals and, significantly, gave rise to an increasing use of methodological research to better define cultural value and evaluation, which is still practised today. Renewed commitment to archives and libraries The documentary heritage sector benefited from a renewed commitment to archives and libraries. For example, Chris Smith’s initiative Centres for Social Change: museums, libraries, and archives for all (Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2000) set out a policy To promote the involvement in culture and leisure activities of those at risk of social disadvantage or marginalisation, particularly by virtue of the area they live in; their disability, poverty, age, racial or ethnic origin. To improve the quality of people’s lives by these means. (Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2000)

This was soon followed by a series of specific policies that benefited the documentary heritage sector, for example: the Public Services Quality Group (the Quality Forum for Archives and Local Studies) initiated a consultation in 1999 that formed the basis for A Standard for Access to Archives, (National Council on Archives, 2008), to include local authorities. This focused on the government’s policy on archives and was in part a response to the Modernising Government initiative, along with the DCMS’s Re:source-funded Developing the 21st Century Archive: an action plan for United Kingdom archives (Re:source, 2001). The importance of evidence Evidence to underpin policy formation and to measure effectiveness was a hallmark of the Blair Labour government and continued under

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successive governments. An industry of evaluation to define the social benefits of publicly funded services grew. What emerged from successive programmes of research and development was clear: there is no single metric that can adequately express the value of these services. A range of quantitative and qualitative methods have emerged over years of scrutiny as necessary mechanisms to capture the value and benefits of experiencing culture, and the breadth of services that cultural institutions provide and the impact that can be realised in the long-term. Since 2000, considerable research funding has been made available to explore more nuanced ways of capturing and expressing value. For example, the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s (AHRC) Understanding the Value of Arts and Culture project argues the need to ‘cumulatively establish a framework that will advance the way in which we talk about the value of cultural engagement and the methods by which we evaluate value’ (Crossick and Kaszynska, 2015, 7). The importance of capturing evidence that can demonstrate impact has found a voice with Denis Meissner, president of the Society of American Archivists (SAA). He has emphasised the need for compelling evidence: ‘Not the data we usually capture: number of collections, cubic footage, process efficiencies and so forth. Instead data that speaks to the value proposition, economic impact, audiences served and outcomes achieved’ (Meissner, 2016, 2). The 2016 DCMS Cultural White Paper makes explicit the need for evidence to show that participation can contribute to social relationships and community cohesion and/or make communities feel safer and stronger (Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2016, 59–64). How we value our culture and heritage is open to question, and in one way or another threads through all professional life. Whether it is a minister charged with understanding the costs and benefits of a policy initiative, local authority councillors balancing the conflicting demands of public services or, indeed, schoolchildren engaging with collections in their local history centres, in each case the ‘value’ of collections is experienced and implicitly assessed through a variety of lenses: economic, social, intellectual, aesthetic and, of course, emotional. While it is generally agreed that there is a value in identifying, capturing and translating into practice the benefits derived from collections, the services they offer can be complex. Evaluation can be

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used not as a defence but to underpin policy, as the Library and Archives of Canada is seeking to do. Building an evidence base: what is required? Over many years the documentary heritage sector has routinely collected data about services, largely usage data as to the number of on-site and online visitors, as well as numbers of records catalogued and audiences served. However, both anecdotal and published resources highlight the lack of consistent reporting, and lament that too often data gathering becomes an end in itself (Pickford, 2002, 9). Pickford’s pioneering article in 2002 set out a comprehensive list of building blocks for impact evaluation, yet there has been little advance in implementing the recommendations since this study. As a result, while there is considerable data captured annually, such as by the Public Service Quality Group (PSQG) and that provided by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA), its synthesis and presentation to a range of professionals and stakeholders remains a challenge. There are notable exceptions that show that this can be achieved successfully. For example, Culture and Sport Evidence (CASE) was a UK government supported initiative to gather and provide economic and social evidence through an open access database Taking Part, which is updated bi-annually 1.1 Economic and social evaluation There are many social and economic evaluation techniques that can be usefully applied to assess the value and impact of services. These are extensively reported, so they need not be reviewed in full here. Rather, the aim is simply to highlight a range of qualitative and quantitative methods that can be exploited depending on the context for their use. For example, economic valuation is one currency, albeit a crude one, used by central and local authority funders to measure the direct or indirect benefits derived from investment. Methods demonstrating the ‘return on investment’ (ROI) or ‘willingness to pay’ metrics seem to have found little application in the documentary heritage domain (Jura Consultants, 2005). While the economic arguments for investing in arts and culture are widely reported, few studies of the economic value of

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documentary heritage to local communities through tourism, for example, are published – with one exception by Yakel and colleagues, who reported on two independent studies of state and locally funded archives undertaken in Canada and the USA in 2009/10 (Yakel et al., 2012). Their findings report only a modest figure for the indirect economic benefit to local communities. These methods have been reviewed in depth in the Introduction to this volume. The UK-based What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth, a partnership between the London School of Economics, the independent research organization Centre for Cities and the architecture and engineering group Arup, investigated the impact of sports and cultural facilities on economic growth. Their blunt conclusion was that there is very little evidence on cultural events and facilities (What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth, 2016). In contrast, social value, defined as ‘the benefits to society that can be realised from engaging in culture’, is an approach that has gained ground (Carnworth and Brown, 2014, 32). For example, documentary heritage collections deliver social value through educational programmes or improved wellbeing, individuals benefit from a heritage experience, and therefore a social value can be measured. Several studies designed to investigate the social benefits of engaging with cultural experiences, for example improved literacy, improved health and a sense of wellbeing, have been conducted (Taylor et al., 2015). Research has found positive links between cultural participation and improved social skills and engagement with the wider community and developing a sense of local place and identity. This approach is attracting the attention of decision makers and, increasingly, philanthropists who are looking beyond the traditional paths of sponsorship and support. Instead they are paying much more attention to impact and engagement, promoting social value such as literacy, improved health or supporting innovation. Narratives and case studies While data gathering and reporting provides an important strand of evidence, these cannot convey the complex web of experiences offered by documentary heritage services. In some situations, narrative, or

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‘story telling’, is an effective way to communicate, or what Brophy terms ‘sensemaking’ (Brophy, 2007, 149–58). There are many examples of community lectures offered by local authors and historians whose work has been based on documentary heritage sources, often reported as useful case histories to convey the rich stories to be uncovered in archives, such as those used by the Yorkshire Country House Partnership (Yorkshire Country House Partnership, 2018). While these are often championed as a compelling strand of evidence in some contexts, in order to be credible the use of stories drawn from the archives needs to be generalised and scalable if they are to be used as evidence to inform, for example, social policy agendas and, by implication, resource allocation. Research into evaluation methods has evolved since the 1990s and it is now widely agreed that a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods could be usefully applied to services already being delivered by the documentary heritage sector. The ways of achieving this objective remain unexplored. The following are a few possible approaches. Contributing to the creative economy: completing the innovation circle The heritage sector, which includes archives, is recognised as one of the creative industries, a sector that is growing and currently contributes 7% to GDP (Creative Industries, 2016). Heritage features in the UK government’s Industrial Strategy (HM Government, 2017, 234) as a potential pillar of growth and is already a significant economic signature in the UK. This recognition presents a huge opportunity for the sector to advocate for the contribution of documentary heritage industries/services to the growing creative economy through the provision of resources and services. For example, the extensive literary canon that inspires our film, TV, theatre and cultural heritage experiences, contributes to one of the UKs largest exports. Documentary heritage resources provide the inspiration and sources for a significant number of high-impact media exports. This contribution could be evaluated and used as a powerful advocacy tool. Business archives are a unique corporate asset which is important for legitimising corporate culture, legal protection, marketing,

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communications and financial decisions, and can give meaning and confidence to business decisions. Archives inspire innovation and are central to companies such as Fortnum and Mason, Liberty, John Lewis, Marks and Spencer and Standard Life Aberdeen, and make an economic contribution adding both directly and indirectly to the value of their services. Understanding the commercial value and economic contribution is one example of how documentary heritage directly adds value and can help to complete the innovation circle. Economic evaluation metrics such as ROI and Deprival Value (the loss of not having information) could be used to evaluate the value which business archives contribute to the bottom line. Shifting from the prevailing view of information as an intangible asset provided by archives, to a focus on ‘value added’ to an organization, would add compelling evidence as to the value of documentary heritage sources overall (Higson and Waltho, 2009). This will be a challenge, but should be explored. Value of digital licensing and data To serve the seemingly insatiable family history market, internet providers such as Findmypast, and Ancestry for example, license content from the documentary heritage sector. The impact of such companies on the archive sector is discussed in Chapter 9. Value of heritage science The 2016 government White Paper on culture (Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2016, 34) notes that universities not only care for important collections but are also major supporters of culture and undertake ground-breaking research on heritage protection and conservation. Heritage science is a growing discipline that applies scientific research and technological innovation to improve the understanding, management and interpretation of cultural heritage. One of the aims of heritage science research is to better manage material change and to provide a sustainable future for collections through better environmental management and quicker and easier ways to access collections, or to manage tourism of past and future heritage, including documentary heritage.

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Heritage science research programmes are active in many collecting institutions and are adding value to the sector through applied research, often in collaboration with industry partners. For example, exploiting the offer of computational modelling to evaluate building performance is gaining ground and proving effective in reducing energy costs, adding economic value to organizations. Instrumentation developed through Knowledge Transfer Partnerships in collaboration with industry, such as the partnership between the National Archives, UK and Hanwell Instruments, UK, has the potential to generate commercial value from products and services. Developments in machine learning are making it possible to access collections in new ways, such as visual search that opens pipelines of content to researchers in new ways, thus reducing the physical impact on collections and generating a preservation dividend. Techniques for more effective mining of the vast array of data collected by heritage organizations is underway in many institutions to better apportion resources and to demonstrate the social and economic value of documentary heritage collections to the UK. Health and wellbeing value Wellbeing valuation is a fairly recent addition to the social evaluation toolkit. It aims to evaluate a number of factors that contribute to subjective wellbeing; for example, change in income or improved health. The Taking Part survey has investigated the relationship of wellbeing and cultural engagement, although a firm causal link has yet to be established. There is a significant body of literature on this subject, well covered by published academic studies and governmentcommissioned reports which aim to understand the impact of policy intervention on wellbeing. Most of these are focused on museums. There is considerable attention currently on assessing the contribution that documentary heritage collections can make to the health and wellbeing of citizens. For example, ‘Not So Grim Up North’ is a project between University College London, Arts Council England and Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums. The purpose of this project is to investigate the health benefits of experiencing collections for people living with dementia or undergoing stroke rehabilitation and addiction recovery (Morse and Chatterjee, 2017). Initiatives like this

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are demonstrating social impact and the launch of the National Alliance for Arts, Health and Wellbeing in 2016, which incorporates the award-winning National Alliance for Museums, Health and Wellbeing, now has a strong regional infrastructure and the support of over 50 leading organizations which are developing strategic partnerships to support development in the field. So far, the only representative of the archive sector is Tyne and Wear Archives.2 The value of social justice and trusted information Archives are the evidential base for many public inquiries. Without the archival records of the South Yorkshire Police and others, the great wrong which had been done to the Liverpool football fans at the time of the Hillsborough disaster would never have been put right. The Hutton and Saville inquiries (into the death of David Kelly, and Bloody Sunday, respectively) depended on a vast accumulation of documentary evidence that had to be painstakingly analysed. Academic value: academic research and development Since 2002, online family history companies have developed sophisticated online offerings of copies of records and, consequently, family historians, who were the biggest users of archives, have increasingly moved away from visiting archives in person and now largely conduct their research online. As a result, the academic audience has become an increasingly important customer group and is seen by some archivists as a potential growth audience. The ability to demonstrate the academic value of archives may prove a valuable tool in arguments about funding. While simple assertions about the academic value of archives are easy to make and some archives record in detail the numbers of academic users and their areas of interest, there has been little research into the use that these users make of the records they consult. In the UK, The National Archives, Research Libraries UK and the academic network services provider JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) have come together in a research programme which aims to furnish the archivist, special collections librarian and information professional with a better understanding of how academics cite document repositories; the nature and volume of

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the published outputs produced based on material held in unique and distinctive collections; and how (and what) material is referenced within these. The research, if successfully completed, will lead to a far greater understanding of how such material is used and an enhanced ability on the part of libraries, archives and museums to demonstrate their value from this perspective. Academic research often informs the wider cultural heritage sector.3 Capturing value and realising impact It is sometimes argued that impact can be difficult to demonstrate because it is time consuming and therefore costly to capture. The task need not be onerous and a number of tools have been developed to support impact assessments that could be usefully exploited in some contexts; for example: DCMS Evidence Toolkit, Taking Part and CASE reports remain excellent sources. Toolkits such as that developed by Simon Tanner’s ‘Measuring the Impact of Digital Resources’ offer potential, as does Brophy’s published model which sets out a scale of assessment that captures individual change, from ‘raised awareness’ at one end of the spectrum to a ‘changed world view’ at the other (Tanner, 2019). These are models that could usefully be adopted, depending on the purpose of the evaluation. There is much to learn from Arts Council England’s ongoing development of improved metrics to move beyond standard performance indicators to using measures to assess the quality of services – for example, participatory experiences – and the emerging protocols developed by the Chartered Institute for Librarians and Information Professionals (CILIP) for information professionals. The Taking Part survey4 remains good evidence, and other initiatives like the Manchester Metrics Project are exemplars that have potential to offer much to the sector.5 Next steps Building an evidence-based culture depends crucially on commonly agreed objectives for the documentary heritage sector as a whole, strong leadership and a willingness to embrace change. The days of strictly held divisions between archives and libraries are over, given that archives, libraries and local history services are all facing the same

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pressure of reduced budgets and the shifting expectations of users for ever more digital provision. There are already some clear ways forward. The National Archives strategy, Archives Unlocked (The National Archives, 2017), sets out an ambitious programme to build resilience for the sector, including a number of initiatives designed to demonstrate the impact of services through better data collection and impact evaluation. However, while this is a laudable first step, an unambiguous single voice from the sector as a whole is required to engage with important work in this area within government and professional bodies. The final report emerging from our research, An Evidence Based Culture for Documentary Heritage Collections (Bell et al., 2017) recommended as a first step that a cross-sector independent ‘task force’ should be set up, to include national, local, professional, government and academic experts to co-create and co-deliver a strategic plan to develop an evidence-based culture for the documentary heritage sector, building on existing cross-sectoral activity and other evaluation studies taking place. It was further recommended that the task force should focus on two key areas, as described below. Upgrading skills and knowledge Up-skilling of professionals in the sector should be prioritised to help them develop an evidence-based culture, including understanding the metrics, tools and impact models available. Professionals see the importance of using evidence to demonstrate the value of their services but often feel too ill-equipped and time strapped to mine the range of information that is necessary to make a case. This requires collaboration with professional bodies such as the Archives and Records Association, lead organisations such as The National Archives and Research Libraries UK, the National Records of Scotland, National Library of Wales and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, as well as regional bodies, academic experts, professional bodies, grantgiving bodies and funders. Addressing research gaps As a starting point in addressing the absence of published research

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exploring the value of documentary heritage collections, the key findings of the project could usefully be taken forward as the basis of a national research strategy for evaluating such collections. A shared research strategy and advocacy to research funders on behalf of the sector are needed in order to secure funds for the evaluation of the long-term impact of the documentary heritage sector. Conclusion The key finding of our study is that the value of documentary heritage services to the UK economy and to wider society is significant and demonstrable if credible data is captured and evaluated. However, evaluation on its own is insufficient, and communication of the sector’s contribution is needed so as to influence policy making or operational management. To ensure a sustainable future in the face of ongoing reductions in budgets, the sector needs urgently to become better at gathering centrally a credible and consistent evidence base that can be used with ‘authority’ and ‘conviction’, if advocacy is to be successful. Assessing the value and impact of documentary heritage services is complex and cannot be demonstrated by a single method or matrix; a range of evaluation tools are required. To develop an evidence-based culture for the sector, a strategic approach is required. This can be developed with strategic partners and allied organisations such as Research Libraries UK, the Archives Records Association and funders, in alignment with the activities of DCMS and the relevant ministries in the devolved administrations. With clear strategic objectives, effective leadership and a single voice representing the many stakeholders in this mix, an evidence-based culture can be developed as the first of many stepping stones to a sustainable future. Notes 1 https://www.gov.uk/guidance/case-programme#case-programme-theresources. 2 https://www.culturehealthandwellbeing.org.uk. 3 http://www.rluk.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Citation-CaptureJoint-RLUK-TNA-Jisc-ITT-.pdf.

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4 https://www.gov.uk/guidance/taking-part-survey. 5 http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/downloadfile/Manchester_Metrics_Stage_One_Report_Dec_2013.pdf.

References Bell, N., McLeod, J., Moss, M. and Thomas, D. (2017) An Evidence-based Culture for Documentary Heritage Collections, Northumbria University, http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/32594. Brettle, A. J. and Maden, M. (2016) What Evidence Is There to Support the Employment of Trained and Professionally Registered Library, Information and Knowledge Workers? University of Salford, http://usir.salford.ac.uk/39034/2/Value%20of%20trained%20librarians%2 0scoping%20final.pdf. Brophy, P. (2007) Narrative Based Practice, Evidence-based Library and Information Practice, 2 (1), 149–58. Carnworth, J. D. and Brown, A. S. (2014) Understanding the Value and Impacts of Cultural Experience: a literature review, Arts Council England. Creative Industries (2016), http://www.thecreativeindustries.co.uk/ukcreative-overview/news-and-views/news-creative-industries-earn-uk-al most-%C2%A392bn. Crewe, T. (2016) The Strange Death of Municipal England, London Review of Books, 15 December, 6–10. Crossick, G. and Kaszynska, P. (2015) Understanding the Value of Arts and Culture, AHRC. Department for Culture Media and Sport (2000), Centres for Social Change: museums, libraries, archives for all, policy, guidance on social inclusion for DCMS funded and local authority museums, libraries, and archives in England, http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20100113222743/http:/www. cep.culture.gov.uk/images/publications/centres_social_change.pdf. Department for Culture, Media and Sport (2016) The Cultural White Paper, HMSO. Department for Digital, Culture Media and Sport (2017) Taking Part survey 2016/17 Quarterly Reporting, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_d ata/file/586932/Taking_Part_2016–17_Q2_Report.pdf. Higson, C. and Waltho, D. (2009) Valuing Information as an Asset, London School of Economics,

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http://faculty.london.edu/chigson/research/InformationAsset.pdf. HM Government (2017) Industrial Strategy, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. HM Treasury (1965) A Policy for the Arts First Steps, HMSO. Jowell, T. (2004) Government and the Value of Culture, Leisure Manager, 22 (7), 8–10. Jura Consultants (2005) Bolton’s Museum, Library, and Archive Services: an economic valuation, Bolton Metropolitan Borough Council and MLA Northwest. Meissner, D. (2016) Collecting Data that Demonstrates Value, Archival Outlook, January/February, 2. Morse, N. and Chatterjee, H. (2017) Museums, Health and Wellbeing Research: co-developing a new observational method for people with dementia in hospital contexts, Perspectives in Public Health, 138 (3), 152–9, https://doi.org/10.1177/1757913917737588. The National Archives (2017) Archives Unlocked, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/archives/ArchivesUnlocked-Brochure.pdf. National Council on Archives (2008) Public Services Quality Group, A Standard for Access to Archives. Pickford, C. (2002) Archives: a statistical overview, Cultural Trends, 12 (48), 1–36. Re:source (2001) Developing the 21st Century Archive: an action plan for United Kingdom Archives, VIP Print Ltd, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/archives/archives-forthe-21st-century.pdf. Silk, K. (2018) Scoping Exercise: value study of galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMS), Brightsail Research Inc. Strathern, M. (ed.) (2000) Audit Cultures: anthropological studies in accountability, ethics, and the academy, Routledge. Tanner, S. (2019) Delivering Impact with Digital Resources: planning strategy in the attention economy, Facet. Taylor, P., Davies, L., Wells, P., Gilbertson, J. and Tayleur, W. (2015) A Review of the Social Impacts of Culture and Sport, The Cultural and Sports Evidence Programme, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/ uploads/attachment_data/file/416279/A_review_of_the_Social_Impacts_ of_Culture_and_Sport.pdf.

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What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth (2016) Evidence Review 3, Sports and Culture, http://www.whatworksgrowth.org/public/files/Policy_Reviews/ 16-06-15_Culture_and_Sport_Updated.pdf. Yakel, E., Duff, W., Tibbo, H., Kriesburg, A. and Cushing, A. (2012) The Economic Impact of Archives: surveys of users of government archives in Canada and the United States, The American Archivist, 75 (2), 297–325. Yorkshire House Partnership (2018) http://www.ychp.org.uk/exhibitions. Zephoria Digital Marketing (2019) The Top Twenty Valuable Facebook Statistics, https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/.

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CHAPTER 3 Value in fragments: an Australian perspective on re-contextualisation Helen Morgan, Cate O’Neill, Nikki Henningham, Gavan McCarthy and Annelie De Villiers

Introduction Archival records need context in order to maintain their value. Indeed, value is rarely inherent. It needs to be excavated, lifted out, exposed and made explicit; and it needs to be shared widely to take its place in broader contexts in order to grow and create value in the collective. Conceptualisations of value in the archive are constantly changing and dynamic, and context and re-contextualisation – core to the work of archivists – underpins this. Context is perhaps best understood as a series of questions, such as: What happened before? What happened after? What was happening at the same time? Who was involved? Where did things happen? When did things happen? Which, when all combined, might help to answer the question: Why did things happen? (McCarthy et al., forthcoming). Record systems and archival systems don’t always make this collation of context possible, but continuum model thinking,1 incorporated by design into systems, with its emphasis on multiple purposes and values, potentially does. But not all records which have – or have the potential to bear – value as archives are waiting patiently in archival repositories for their value to be appreciated. With changing conceptions of value – and growing audiences for archival knowledge – unmanaged archival material, fragmentary in nature and sitting at and outside the boundary of the archive, is proving highly valuable.

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.

Archival interventions This chapter is written by archivists and historians from the University of Melbourne’s eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC, the Centre) to reflect on the value that we add or diminish by our archival interventions and the means by which (and reasons why) we work at the boundary of the archive. Critically, these reasons include the desire to situate the materials of the archive ‘in a contextual information framework that helps make them understandable to those without the deep lived experience of the field’ (McCarthy et al., forthcoming). The work of the ESRC, a post-custodial archival service based in a research environment and operating in the digital space, offers unique insights into the value of archives for the general public, as well as for specific communities. Situated originally within the University of Melbourne faculty structure, the group of archivists who had worked together as the Australian Science Archives Project moved into the library and academic services area on the transformation of the group into a research centre. A core tenet of the original organization was its tradition of looking outward, working with fragmentary, houseless collections and working with records creators (usually individuals) to co-create documentation about records, with the goal always of establishing this knowledge as part of national research infrastructure (McCarthy et al., 2016). From a remit of science archives, the Centre’s scope broadened to include projects in the humanities and social sciences. In this chapter we provide an overview of understandings of value in the Australian archival landscape and present case studies from three major ESRC projects – the Australian Women’s Register (2000 onwards), the Find & Connect web resource project (2009 onwards) and Return, Reconcile, Renew (2013 onwards) – through which the ESRC has partnered with diverse organizations to apply its methodology to women’s history, the history of children’s institutions and the repatriation of ancestral human remains from museum collections and archives to indigenous communities. All of these projects use the Centre’s Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM) system to identify and locate records, document them (with communities and partners) and create digital knowledge bases in the form of complex networks of people, organizations, objects and archival and bibliographic resources. One of these projects, the Australian Women’s

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Register, became the test case for the National Library of Australia when it was investigating ways of collaborating with the research community via data harvesting to establish the core data sets around which its now significant – and freely available – national discovery system Trove (see below), incorporating the national digitised newspaper collection, operates. Through these case studies we show that archives can be managed in a way that acknowledges their value, especially to marginalised people, and adds value to the community. Establishing value in the Australian archival landscape The presence of a record in an archive is some kind of objective evidence of its value. And yet there is nothing objective about the archival processes (and power relations) that determine the value of records and identify what is to be kept and what is destroyed, what is to be remembered and what is forgotten. In these processes of survey, selection, appraisal, arrangement and description and provision of access, archival values – and the values of records creators – are at play. It is worth remembering that permanent-value records within an archival collection are not all treated as having equal value. Some languish in the ‘backlog’ while others are digitised, indexed, described within an inch of their life and put on display in exhibitions and public programmes. Archives are not faithful, straightforward reflections of reality. They are active, contested sites of agency and power, where understandings of value turn on what the present values about the past. Contestation affirms archival value and signals that the construction of value is changing, becoming translational and transitory. The National Archives of Australia (NAA) provides useful information about the processes underpinning its archival collection in a publication from 2015, What We Keep. This document is a layperson’s guide to the archival processes used by NAA to ensure that ‘the most valuable information is kept permanently and preserved for future generations and other information is only kept for as long as needed for business, legal and evidentiary purposes’ (NAA, 2015). It goes into some detail about the selection principles and associated considerations that underpin decision making about what is included in the NAA collection. The three selection principles are:

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1 government authority, action and accountability 2 identity, interaction and rights and entitlements 3 knowledge and community memory. The inclusion of ‘knowledge and community memory’ in this document demonstrates the changing ideas about value over time, particularly as the study of history has expanded beyond that of the ‘winners’ to everyday social and applied histories, including the stories of the marginalised.2 In Australia there is no definitive local guide to assessing and establishing the value of archives. Where, for example, the Australian museum field has Significance 2.0 (Russell and Winkworth, 2009) to guide decision making about the value of objects, the nearest equivalent for archives are the Retention and Disposal Authorities (RDAs) produced by national, state and territory archival authorities. RDAs can be general, or specific to particular agencies or functions. In setting out the categories of records worthy of permanent retention, temporary retention (although the period of temporary retention can be for 75 years or more) and what records can be destroyed as ‘normal administrative practice’ (NAP), RDAs are a useful way to get insight into what value is assigned to different records and how conceptions of value change with societies. Changing attitudes towards archival value Case files Case files, known in various jurisdictions as ‘dossiers, dockets, particular instance papers, project files or transactional files’ are a class of record that have traditionally been seen as of temporary value because they relate to specific actions, events, persons, places, projects or other subjects.3 In most Australian RDAs, record keepers are instructed to destroy case management records after a set period of retention, or to cull them to retain a representative sample in the permanent collection. Collections of case files have nevertheless survived (whether because of backlogs or happenstance) and, after being used by historians, have taken on new value. Case files are a way that social historians can uncover the life experiences of the marginalised and the

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powerless; they provide a voice for the voiceless. Poststructuralist historians can examine case files because of what they reveal about the creators, not the subjects – the power relations and systems of these records. And while acknowledging that any particular set of case files will be only fragments of the bigger personal story, try telling a family historian that their ancestor’s case file has no value. These uses of case files reveal their ‘knowledge and community memory’ value, to use the NAA framework. Social and political developments can also affect records’ value under the ‘identity, interaction and rights and entitlements’ category. The Windrush scandal, still being played out in the UK at the time of writing, highlights in a very public way the importance of archival records for individuals to assert their rights – indeed, as Vargha notes, archives’ broader significance ‘tends to only come to light when they stop working’ (Vargha, 2018). New laws and regulations to tackle illegal migration put the onus on individuals to prove their immigration status, and a generation of older Caribbean-born people have found themselves unable to prove their legal status, being refused re-entry to Britain and denied access to services (Gentleman, 2018). The plight of the Windrush generation has seen public scrutiny about a decision by the Home Office in 2010 to destroy a collection of disembarkation cards from the 1950s and 1960s. The immense value of these immigration records to the community has been demonstrated only now that the landing cards have been destroyed.4 The Bringing Them Home inquiry In Australia, the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families from 1995 to 1997 (more commonly referred to as the Bringing Them Home or the Stolen Generations inquiry; Commonwealth of Australia, 1997) transformed understandings of archival value in Australia.5 The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s final report devoted an entire chapter to ‘Access to Personal and Family Records’, making a clear connection between archives and identity for indigenous Australians:

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Access to knowledge can assist: to reinstate pride in family experiences; enhance a stronger sense of identity; re-establish contacts with family members; reaffirm interaction with broad family networks; revive and maintain Aboriginal traditions ...; understand the historical background of contemporary personal issues ...; re-claim ownership of material pertaining to family life; develop resources ... and enhance research skills.6

In the wake of the Bringing Them Home report (Commonwealth of Australia, 2017) and its affirmation of the value of records to the Stolen Generations (and the role that access to records plays in restorative justice), the archival profession in Australia embarked on a number of projects to improve access to records for members of the Stolen Generations. This saw the publication of a number of new finding aids, indexing projects and memoranda of understanding to bypass the complex and unwieldy ‘patchwork of laws’ governing access to records. Disposal freezes and moratoriums The NAA responded to Bringing Them Home by issuing an indefinite disposal freeze, preventing the destruction of any records ‘which might be of assistance in Indigenous family reunions’, recognising that value was not to be determined by the ‘class’ of the material but by how it might be used. In 2009 the NAA extended the scope of this disposal freeze to include ‘records that contain information on policy or procedures about withholding wages, pensions or allowances from indigenous Australians between 1 January 1901 and 31 December 1989, or information about individuals affected by these policies and procedures’.7 The guidelines for agency staff relating to this disposal freeze state that any records should be retained ‘no matter how trivial the information’.8 Other inquiries into the past treatment of children in Australia, which will be discussed in the case study about the Find & Connect web resource, have led to more disposal freezes being issued by the NAA and state archival authorities. As a result of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2012–17), the NAA issued another disposal freeze, this time emphasising the evidentiary

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value of records in its explanatory documentation. The NAA’s notice of the disposal freeze relating to responses to child abuse noted that past records authorities would have given advice to destroy records now known to be of potential evidentiary value to survivors of child sexual abuse. Similar steps were taken in Britain, with the Home Secretary requesting a moratorium on the destruction of records in 2015, due to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA). The Inquiry also issued retention instructions to a range of institutions, requesting the preservation of all records relating to the care of children so that they would remain available for the duration of the inquiry, and confirming that prolonged retention of records by institutions would not be a contravention of the Data Protection Act 1998 (IICSA, 2015). This example shows that tools such as RDAs need to be responsive to changing social demands. Archival policies and practices change to reflect new understandings of the value of archival records. A ‘trivial’ reference to a person, a record of a financial transaction, a name on a piece of paper – these examples are now accepted as being of great potential value, as evidence of a person’s identity, rights and entitlements, or evidence of wrongdoing. Case study: the Australian Women’s Register and the National Library of Australia’s Trove We begin our case study approach with an analysis of one of the Centre’s oldest projects – the Australian Women’s Archives Project and Australian Women’s Register (www.womenaustralia.info) – which grew out of the concerns of second-wave feminists and scholars about atrisk personal and non-government organizational records relating to women’s history, and the need to both salvage and share feminist knowledge. Uncovering, determining and making value explicit is the basis of all work undertaken by the Australian Women’s Archives Project (AWAP), communicated through the online web resource the Australian Women’s Register.9 The AWAP is a joint programme of the National Foundation for Australian Women and the University of Melbourne, established in 2000 to support the preservation of Australian women’s archival material. The AWAP was and remains

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non-custodial, seeking funding on a project-by-project basis to support the physical preservation and documentation of women’s records. From the beginning, the AWAP determined to expose this documentation to the public via an online register based on the International Council on Archives (ICA) standard for creating authority records about people, organizations, events and concepts (ICA, 1995). This eventually became the Australian Women’s Register, which documents a complex contextual network of Australian women and their archival and bibliographic resources (Henningham et al., 2017; Henningham and Morgan, 2016). In all three decades preceding the Register’s creation, feminist scholars published guides to archival holdings relating to Australian women in public repositories. Often, the value of records to women’s history must be excavated in this manner. In the same way that women have been marginalised in history, evidence of women, their activities and contributions can be found tucked away in the records of government and organizations and in records ostensibly about men. The Register’s purpose is to create and share feminist knowledge through the evidence of records, knowledge which can be equated with ‘archival value’ – to create a research infrastructure exposing feminist value in archival records for all those interested in the history of women in Australia. As state and national archive repositories began putting their series, inventory and authority catalogues online, the online space offered clear advantages for bringing this knowledge together and the Register model (relational, online and free) offered a mechanism for safeguarding this knowledge and value. Creating value through metadata One way of uncovering, creating and safeguarding value in archival records is by bringing information about them (archival metadata) together – creating collective value through context-driven collation. The Australian Women’s Register, as it approaches its 20th anniversary, contains more than 6,000 entries on women and organisations, 8,000+ bibliographic records, more than 1,000 digital resources (such as photographs) and almost 4,000 entries documenting archival holdings relating to Australian women in 180 repositories and private collections. There is safety in numbers.

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Breaking the metadata up into its component parts (biographical, bibliographical and archival) and treating the descriptions of subjects and resources as unique entries enables them to be related to one another, adding new value, both intrinsic and extrinsic, and exposing potentially new relationships. Conversely, thematic (essay-based) exhibitions based on specific groups of women (such as women lawyers and women with disabilities) complement the encyclopedic structure of the Register and are another tool for uncovering value in the evidence base (archival records). Data sharing with Trove A key means by which the Register supports the creation of new knowledge in the Australian women’s history space is through its sharing of data with the National Library of Australia’s Trove discovery service.10 Trove now plays a significant role in supporting all kinds of research in Australia and beyond.11 In its own words, ‘Trove helps you find and use resources relating to Australia. It’s more than a search engine. Trove brings together content from libraries, museums, archives and other research organisations and gives you tools to explore and build. Trove is many things: a community, a set of services, an aggregation of metadata, and a growing repository of full text digital resources.’ 12 The Register makes available a highly structured copy of its data – including all biographical data and related resource data – to the National Library of Australia for harvesting into Trove’s People and Organisations zone.13 This data functions as a form of authority record – datum points making possible aggregation of Trove’s other rich data sources from hundreds of external providers, who in sharing become collaborators. Many entries for women and women’s organizations exist only in Trove because they have been harvested from the Register, meaning that a far broader range of women and women’s activities are being represented in the national context than previously. In taking their place as datum points within Trove, the value of Register metadata has the potential to accumulate and expand as more external contributors share their metadata with Trove. A simple way that the Register leverages back value from Trove to its users is by providing a link from Register entries to their authority

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record in Trove. The Trove person/organization entries aggregate all relevant Trove records about the entry, including articles from the digitised newspaper zone,14 which contain a wealth of contextual information about people, organizations, events and things that helps to build knowledge. The historic digitised newspapers and gazettes, at the time of writing numbering more than 18.5 million pages, are the jewel in the crown of Trove’s digital resources. Access to these newspapers and gazettes, like all of Trove, is free. Thousands of Trove users help with text correction of the OCR-derived text, which supports fine-grained searching and discovery of content. (Content from the digitised newspapers zone is also indexed by Google.) Thousands of users add tags and comments across the range of Trove content, inscribing their own value on records, including archival metadata harvested from multiple external repositories – a beautiful example of democratised value creation, citizen history and community curating. The Australian Women’s Register was the first external data-set harvested into Trove. Exposing Register data in this national research context ensures that the knowledge being created within the Register (feminist knowledge/archival value) is safeguarded, and further helps to create and grow collective value and reveal new community-based value around the records it cites. Case study: Find & Connect and the value of archives to Care Leavers15 In the section ‘Establishing value in the Australian archival landscape’ we discussed how the Bringing Them Home inquiry in Australia provided a watershed moment, elevating the value of archives relating to the past institutionalisation of children. In response to Bringing Them Home, and subsequent inquiries in 2001 and 2004 into child migration and children’s institutions respectively, the archival community embarked on a range of projects to identify, document, preserve and improve access to these records. Of these archival projects, the Find & Connect web resource is the most ambitious and largest in scale. The ESRC was funded by the Australian government in 2011 to develop a national web resource for Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants, to whom a national apology was made in Parliament on 16 November 2009. The Find & Connect web resource

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(www.findandconnect.gov.au), a single online access point to help Care Leavers locate extant records relating to their time in children’s institutions, was one element in a package of services and projects funded by the Australian government in a follow-up to the apology, including a museum exhibition, an oral history project and the establishment of a support service in each capital city, employing counsellors and record-tracing staff to assist and support Care Leavers. The Pathways website Before the national apology, the ESRC had developed an online resource for Care Leavers in the state of Victoria, known then as the Pathways website, an outcome of an interdisciplinary research project responding to the recommendations relating to archives and records in the Senate’s ‘Forgotten Australians’ report (2004). Pathways sought to document the history of child welfare in Victoria, reaching back in time to the earliest days of colonial government, and up to the presentday system of Out-of-Home Care in Victoria. The research project (known as ‘Who am I? Making records meaningful’) ran from 2008 to 2012 and was informed by the concepts of the ‘records continuum’ and the ‘Knowledge Diamond’ – approaches that recognise that knowledge comes from many sources. Funded as an Australian Research Council Linkage Project (LP0883232), ‘Who Am I?’ brought together diverse groups with different knowledge and expertise to explore the importance of records to Care Leavers and to improve practice in supporting Care Leavers as well as children and young people in contemporary Out-of-Home Care. From Pathways to Find & Connect When the ESRC was funded in 2011 to redevelop the Pathways website on a national scale as Find & Connect, the project was deeply influenced by its roots in ‘Who Am I’, continuing the methodology informed by the Knowledge Diamond and continuum theory. The Find & Connect web resource project is an interdisciplinary research project, where the ESRC team works closely with organizations in the government and community service sectors and, most importantly, collaborates with Care Leavers to produce an online resource that responds to their

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needs.16 The web resource is ‘situated in the “pluralized”, fourth dimension of the records continuum, a space where there are multiple stakeholders, multiple perspectives and multiple (and often competing) truths’ (Jones and O’Neill, 2014). Find & Connect is another example of the OHRM system and methodology in action, producing a community-based information resource, underpinned by archival standards and principles for archival information services in the public domain (McCarthy and Evans, 2012). The Find & Connect web resource comprises 16,000+ interconnected pages and receives over 10,000 visitors a month. It includes entries about institutions (including orphanages, reformatories and maternity homes) and the organizations that ran them (from the government, charitable and religious sectors). It also has contextual entities about the legislation governing child welfare and adoption, key events in the history of institutional ‘care’ in Australia and glossary terms and concepts. The database also comprises published resources and digital objects, photographs being records of immense value and significance to Care Leavers. The archival record There are also entries about the archival records that survive and are distributed across Australia (and overseas) in a diverse range of repositories. The archival entities in the database include plainlanguage descriptions of the records, information about access policies and contact details of the records-holding organization. The content relating to archival resources in Find & Connect is developed in a way to be most useful to support services for Care Leavers, and is informed by the ICA’s Principles of Access to Archives (ICA, 2012). The documentation of archival records on Find & Connect aims to provide the public with information about the existence of records, whether they are on open or closed access. The Find & Connect project advocates for Care Leaver records to be opened ‘to the greatest extent possible’ (Principle 1) and for record-holding organizations to take a pro-active approach to access (Principle 3), working with Find & Connect to cocreate information about their collections that is transparent and meaningful to Care Leavers.

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Records losses The page relating to the records of a babies’ home in South Australia provides an example of archival documentation produced in collaboration between the Find & Connect team and the record-holding organization, using language that acknowledges the vital importance of records to Care Leavers as well as the harm caused by poor recordkeeping practices and record-keeping systems (George and George, 2011). The description of the archival collection ‘Records of Kate Cocks Memorial Babies Home (1930s–1970s)’ held by Uniting Communities (a community service organization in South Australia of the Uniting Church in Australia) sets out the scope of the collection: administrative records about the running of the home, miscellaneous documents and photographs. It contains the statement: ‘Unfortunately no admission records or personal files of children have survived.’ The page goes on to explain the story of the records’ destruction, stating that ‘For some years it was understood that some of these records had been destroyed in a fire.’ Fires and floods abound in discussions about Care Leaver records and are often cited as the reason for missing records. Not surprisingly, these stories of fires and floods are often met with suspicion by Care Leavers. For this reason, the Find & Connect team provides information wherever possible about those fires and floods that can be verified. For Kate Cocks Home, the team was able to find evidence of a fire at the home in 1975 and the Find & Connect entry states: ‘Media articles and photographs show that the fire, which started in a dormitory bedroom, destroyed the room and its contents. The rest of the building suffered smoke and water damage.’ Uniting Communities provided a photograph showing the fire damage and this is a digital object related to the archival collection. However, the Find & Connect entry goes on: ‘There is no evidence to confirm the loss of records in this fire.’ Indeed, there was evidence about the circumstances of the records’ destruction. Uniting Communities provided Find & Connect with copies of correspondence indicating that the home had transferred children’s personal records to the Department of Community Welfare in the late 1970s. The organization’s records also revealed that the government department subsequently destroyed these records ‘as the policy then was that it was improper for the Government to retain information for extended

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periods about former clients’. This destruction of records of individual children in institutions was a widespread practice in Australia during a time when the value and significance of these records was not appreciated. Under past record-keeping systems there was no business or compliance requirement for agencies to keep good records about children, let alone to preserve and manage these records in a way that would make them accessible for years to come. It is clear that most care providers had no idea that children would one day return to the organization as adults and ask to see the records which they were sure must be in existence: ‘unfortunately what was momentous to the Stolen Children may have been incidental to the government’. Nor did the records creators foresee the devastating effects of their lack of recording (Wickman, 2003).17 The Find & Connect entry about this archival collection concludes with a statement from the record-holding organization: ‘Uniting Communities expresses its deep regret that client records have been destroyed.’ It is worth stating that Find & Connect fails to document most archival entries as comprehensively as is demonstrated in the example of the records of the Kate Cocks Home. The web resource is reliant on the information and documentation of the record-holding organizations to produce its content, and the quality of information varies widely. Some organizations and institutions have been more willing to work with Find & Connect than others. And Find & Connect is also limited in the amount of resources that can be devoted to outreach and engagement as well as conducting research to uncover the many stories of the distributed collection of Care Leaver records. Value to Care Leavers Today, the value of Care Leaver records is well established and widely acknowledged. The archival records documented on Find & Connect have different values and meanings to different people and communities. Past providers of ‘care’ increasingly acknowledge the importance of the records in their custody as institutional memory and as a way of demonstrating their commitment to avoiding repetition of and providing redress for the past. For Care Leavers, records can be

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of immense symbolic value. Back in the days of the ‘Who am I?’ project, discussions about the value of records for Care Leavers emphasised the importance of records in helping a person to build and reshape a sense of identity. With the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, the focus shifted towards the evidentiary value of records. The public attention and the Commission’s inquisitorial powers resulted in record-holding organizations greatly improving the documentation of their records relating to institutional care (and documenting and linking to this new information is a major activity of the Find & Connect project at the time of writing). Apparently peripheral or low-value records – such as receipts and file notes – have been used to provide evidence for the existence of institutional abuse and of individual and systemic responses to the problem.18 To provide one example, evidence corroborating allegations of child abuse by the superintendent of The Bungalow, an institution in Alice Springs, was found in an unlikely record: employment correspondence relating to the superintendent’s wife. The records showed that the wife had requested that she should stay on at The Bungalow after her husband was fired (Find & Connect web resource project, 2013).19 A National Redress Scheme for people who have experienced institutional child sexual abuse commenced in 2018 (to run for ten years). It is likely that the value of Care Leaver records in Australia will continue to be reshaped and renegotiated as a result. Case study: ‘Return, Reconcile, Renew’ In 2013 the ESRC was invited to be a partner on the Australian Research Council Linkage Project ‘Return, Reconcile, Renew: understanding the history, effects and opportunities of repatriation and building an evidence base for the future’ (LP130100131). The project set out to investigate the history and effects of the removal and repatriation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ancestral remains. A particular focus was on ancestral remains that were taken to museums and scientific research institutions overseas, often with the intent of establishing a ‘scientific’ foundation for the concept of race. The project was driven by three indigenous communities who had been engaged in tracking down their ancestors’ remains and finding resources that told their story. This had proved to be painstaking, time

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consuming and happenstance (Cubillo, 2010). Two important goals of the project were to minimise duplication of research efforts and to educate the general public about the cultural importance of repatriation. The primary role of the ESRC was to guide the building of a digital knowledge base of repatriation-related information to support the efforts of indigenous communities (Turnbull, 2016). This case study provides an overview of the types of materials (or resources) collated within the knowledge base. Some of these materials were held in well-maintained archives, some were discovered forgotten in the backs of cupboards in back rooms, some important fragments were found in published books and catalogues and critical knowledge was in the memory of key participants, whether they were from academia or from communities. Each of these fragments is of value, but it was only in their registration, copying, assembling and interconnecting that their value for the purposes of the community could be realised. Resource typologies To help manage how these fragments could be used in this new context, given constraints imposed by copyright, information licensing and the imperative that the communities should control this newly assembled knowledge, a typology of resources was developed. Table 3.1 opposite describes the four different types of resource. Only one of the types, ‘(b) Managed archival material’, is what is generally considered ‘archival’ – materials consciously kept and maintained as a record of some activity. The particular value of these materials is in their documentation and contextualisation that ties them into the processes that led to their creation and keeping. It is the role of the archivist and the service of the archive that enables these materials to become datum points in the historical landscape. Published materials, type (a), also act as datum points of human action and interpretation; they act as records, but they are composed artefacts created specifically to be published. In terms of information security, these two types play a critical and necessary role. They ensure that materials are available through time and that there are appropriate mechanisms for managing access that can reflect the information needs of individuals and communities.

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Table 3.1

‘Return, Reconcile, Renew’ typology of resources (from internal project report)

Type of record

Description

Accessibility

Example

a) Published information

Published through a formal publication process.

Easily discoverable and available to the public.

Books, articles, issued DVDs, including online digital forms.

b) Managed archival Documented and material managed by an archival repository. Catalogue information may be accessible. Document itself may be accessible online.

Discoverable by the public. Available to individuals, may require registration.

Museum catalogues, correspondence, field notebooks and diaries managed within a formal repository.

c) Unmanaged archival material

Not catalogued and not managed in an archival repository.

Not easily discoverable and generally not available for consultation.

Correspondence, photos, oral history and community memory, not managed within a formal repository.

d) Researcher notes

Not published, not catalogued, not in an archival repository.

Not easily discoverable and rarely available for consultation.

The copies and notes compiled by repatriation researchers over the course of projects/their career.

The other two types, ‘(c) Unmanaged archival material’ and ‘(d) Researcher notes’, are materials that have value as records but are situated in environments not specifically geared for long-term preservation. That they do survive is more a result of benign neglect and good fortune. They are in a state of higher information entropy – they have had less effort put into their preservation and are at much higher risk of being lost or destroyed at any moment. Key activities The process of bringing together these fragmented materials comprised two key activities. The first involved getting copies (preferably digital) of the materials and registering them in a systematic manner. This process addressed both the information security and information entropy concerns of the communities. The second activity focused on building a framework of information about the

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‘things’ that the materials documented, of which they were records. This included creating specific authority entries for ancestral remains, historical people, organizations, events, places, legislation and so on. These authority entries became nodes for connecting the fragments in a manner that contributed significantly to their interpretation. The iterative action-research methodology of the project meant that the data model of the knowledge base was directly informed by the three partner community organizations (the Ngarringjeri Regional Authority, Kimberley Aboriginal Law and Culture Corporation and Gur A Baradharaw Kod Torres Strait Sea and Land Council). The involvement of the partner communities was essential to the reclaiming and repurposing of these fragments to meet their needs. Meeting community expectations The creation of digital (and material) collections from distributed sources stemming from information repatriation activities is becoming increasingly common among indigenous Australians as a means of reclaiming and repurposing knowledge for community purposes. The uptake of systems that are geared, by design, to be culturally appropriate, such as Ara Irititja (http://www.irititja.com), have become part of the archival landscape. These systems offer a means through which dissemination and interaction can be managed in a manner that attempts to meet community expectations. The weakness of the systems is their presumption that all materials are either of type (a) or type (b), that is, they are managed and preserved by some other agency. Such systems are not immune to both information security and entropy risks. Rapidly changing technology, dependence on continuing resourcing, organizational fragility, variable IT expertise and archival knowledge are the major contributors to this risk (Ormond-Parker and Sloggett, 2012). The ‘Return, Reconcile, Renew’ project team, in consideration of these risks to the ongoing value of the knowledge base, has used the OHRM system, as it was geared, by design, to enable the registration of all the resource types mentioned in Table 3.1, and the registration and interlinking of the authority entries, in a purposeful manner. In addition, the concept of multi-model output or export of the resulting data in a range of forms including standardised XML, HTML, and PDF

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was essential to meet the varying capabilities of each community, both now and into the future (Bastian, 2017; McCarthy et al., forthcoming). Conclusions The ESRC operates in a way that opens up discussions about archival value beyond the custodians and creators of records. This has changed (iterative processes, action research methodology) over time, along with the changing archival landscape and radical revaluations of the significance of ‘low value’, fragmentary archival records. Communities traditionally excluded from the archives are asserting their rights to be included in archival processes. Indeed, as noted by the Archival Education and Research Institute’s (AERI) Pluralizing the Archival Curriculum Group, archival processes have expanded beyond arrangement and description and appraisal, to include new core concepts such as ‘trust, evidence, accountability, creatorship/cocreatorship, ownership, authenticity, authority, access, and permanence’ (AERI, 2011). These projects demonstrate the clear value of archives to communities and the critical importance of the value of archives as evidence, from the particular (the rights and identity of individuals) to wider social concerns and historical understanding. Conceptualisations of archival value are changing, and the archival community must respond to these changes. The contextual frameworks developed by the ESRC and made available to the public online affirm the value and status of fragmented, distributed archival records as evidence and connect people to the information they need, addressing community needs and redefining value as these contextual frameworks evolve. Notes 1

See, for example, McKemmish, Upward and Reed (2010), p. 4448. See also Monash University, Records Continuum Research Group (RCRG), https://www.monash.edu/it/our-research/research-centres-andlabs/rcrg – and the concise description from the ‘Records Continuum Model’ entry in Wikipedia (accessed 23 April 2018), ‘where activities and interactions transform documents into records, evidence and memory that are used for multiple purposes over time’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Records_Continuum_Model.

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2 See, for example, Barret and Roediger (2017). 3 See glossary, International Records Management Trust and International Council on Archives (1999), p. 6, and of TNA (2012a), 2.4.1.2, footnote 10. 4 TNA (2012b) references the Empire Windrush passenger lists 1948 (BT 26/237) held by The National Archives. These lists, which have been digitised and made available through Ancestry (UK, Incoming Passenger Lists, 1878–1960), provide an alternative record to the destroyed landing cards. Little was made of this by the media in April 2018, although pointed out by the Financial Times (‘National Archives records back case for Windrush migrants’, 21 April 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/dc3f85dc-44b2-11e8-93cf-67ac3a6482fd), flagging further discussion around records as evidence, as the UK Home Office prepared to quibble over what the passenger lists constitute evidence of. 5 https://bth.humanrights.gov.au/ 6 Patrick Dodson, cited in National Report Volume 2: Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1991), Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/IndigLRes/rciadic/national/vol2/. 7 NAA, Records Disposal Freezes and Retention Notices, http://www.naa.gov.au/information-management/managinginformation-and-records/disposal/freezes/index.aspx#section10. 8 NAA, Notice of Disposal Freeze: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Records held by certain Australian Government agencies to include records that relate to the payment of wages, pensions or allowances, http://www.naa.gov.au/Images/indigenous%20wages_tcm16– 95254.pdf. 9 The Australian Women’s Register, ISSN 2207-3124, published continuously since 2000, http://www.womenaustralia.info. 10 https://trove.nla.gov.au. 11 Some of the more recent journal articles from outside the HASS domain, for example, that have mined Trove’s digitised newspapers for historical information include: Buckley, Thurstan and Tobin (2017); Silcock, Witt and Fensham (2016); and Quarrell et al. (2017). An example of ‘beyond’ includes Smits (2016). 12 http://help.nla.gov.au/trove/using-trove/getting-to-know-us. 13 http://help.nla.gov.au/trove/using-trove/finding-things/finding-people.

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14 The Ina Higgins example discussed in Henningham and Morgan (2016) is a good example, see http://www.womenaustralia.info/biogs/AWE5420b.htm and click the Trove icon. 15 In this chapter we use the term Care Leavers to denote all people who spent time in children’s institutions in Australia. This includes members of the Stolen Generations, Former Child Migrants and the approximately 500,000 other people who were in institutional ‘care’ as children. This last group of people are often referred to as ‘Forgotten Australians’, after the title of the 2004 Senate report ‘Forgotten Australians: a report on Australians who experienced institutional or out-of-home care as children’. As Golding (2015) and Wilson and Golding (2016) have noted, Forgotten Australians as a term for this large group of people is somewhat contested within the community – many preferring other terms, such as Care Leavers (a term which has an enduring history in the UK context), or descriptive colloquialisms like Homies, Wardies or Orphos. Our decision to use the term Care Leavers (deliberately capitalised) rather than Forgotten Australians is a response to concerns raised by this community about terminology. In this chapter, we use Care Leavers to denote all Australians who were in children’s institutions, whatever the circumstances of their removal from their families and communities, while acknowledging the importance of distinguishing between the experiences and context behind the institutionalisation of members of the Stolen Generations, Former Child Migrants and the majority of children who were not in these ‘categories’. 16 For more information see Jones and O’Neill (2014); and Swain (2014). 17 For a more in-depth discussion of this issue, see O’Neill et al. (2012). 18 A former employee of the archives unit of the Victorian Department of Human Services provided a submission to a government inquiry, stating that ‘not all information related to care leavers is where it should be and can be disguised as low value financial records or handwritten handover notes and therefore, not easily recognised as a page or chapter of a child’s time in care. Indications of abuse may be documented in handwritten incident reports of a lower category, or behaviour changes noted, in handover diaries and day books without being reported outside of the immediate care staff.’ Name Withheld 3 (2013) Submission to the Inquiry into the Handling of Child Abuse by

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Religious and Other Organisations, 9 April, p. 7. Available at http://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/fcdc/article/1789. 19 The woman’s request was rejected on the grounds that she was a married woman, and thus not allowed to be employed under Commonwealth law.

References AERI (Archival Education and Research Institute) and Pluralizing the Archival Curriculum Group (PACG) (2011) Educating for the Archival Multiverse, The American Archivist, 74 (1), 69–101. Barret, R. and Roediger, D. (2017) History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out: ethnicity, race, and identity in working-class history, Duke University Press. Bastian, J. (2017) Unlocking the Archives and Decolonizing the Records. Critical Archives: New Practices, New Interpretations and New Lives for Archival Materials conference, Deakin University, Burwood, 13–14 November. Buckley, S. M., Thurstan, R. H. and Tobin, A. (2017) Historical Spatial Reconstruction of a Spawning-aggregation Fishery, Conservation, https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.12940. Commonwealth of Australia (1997) Bringing Them Home: report of the National Inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, https://www.humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/content/pdf/ social_justice/bringing_them_home_report.pdf. Commonwealth of Australia (2004) Forgotten Australians: A report on Australians who experienced institutional or out-of-home care as children, https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/ Community_Affairs/Completed_inquiries/2004-07/inst_care/report/index Commonwealth of Australia (2017) Final Report: Royal Commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse, https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/final-report. Cubillo, F. (2010) Repatriating Our Ancestors: who will speak for the dead? In Turnbull, P. and Pickering, M. (eds), The Long Way Home: the meaning and values of repatriation, Berghahn Books. Find & Connect web resource project (2013) Submission to Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Issues

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Paper 4: Preventing Sexual Abuse of Children in Out of Home Care, 8 November. Available at https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/issues-papers. Gentleman, A. (2018) Home Office Destroyed Windrush Landing Cards, Says ex-staffer, Guardian, 17 April, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/17/home-officedestroyed-windrush-landing-cards-says-ex-staffer. George, K. and George, G. (2011) Records of Kate Cocks Memorial Babies Home (1930s–1970s), https://www.findandconnect.gov.au/ref/sa/biogs/SE00754b.htm. Golding, F. (2015) Please Don’t Call Me a Forgotten Australian, 12 July, http://frankgolding.com/please-dont-call-me-a-forgotten-australian/. Henningham, N. and Morgan, H. (2016) The Australian Women’s Register and the Case of the Missing Apostrophe; or, how we learnt to stop worrying and love librarians, The Australian Library Journal, 65 (3), 167–80, doi: 10.1080/00049670.2016.1206094. Henningham, N., Evans, J. and Morgan, H. (2017) The Australian Women’s Archives Project: creating and co-curating community feminist archives in a post-custodial age, Australian Feminist Studies, 32 (91–92), 91–07, doi: 10.1080/08164649.2017.1357015. Humphreys, C. and Kertesz, M. (2012) ‘Putting the heart back into the record’: personal records to support young people in care, Adoption and Fostering, 36 (1), 27–39. ICA (International Council on Archives) Ad Hoc Commission on Descriptive Standards (1995) ISAAR (CPF): International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families, http://www.icacds.org.uk/eng/ISAAR%28CPF%29.pdf. ICA (2012) Principles of Access to Archives, https://www.ica.org/en/principles-access-archives IICSA (Independent Inquiry Child Sexual Abuse) (2015) Chair of the Inquiry Issues Guidance on the Destruction of Documents, 23 June, https://www.iicsa.org.uk/news/chair-of-the-inquiry-issues-guidance-ondestruction-of-documents. International Records Management Trust and International Council on Archives (1999) Managing Public Sector Records: a study programme, www.irmt.org/documents/educ_training/educ_resource/IRMT_ed_rec_ glossary.doc and 2.4.1.2. Jones, M. and O’Neill, C. (2014) Identity, Records and Archival Evidence:

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exploring the needs of Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants, Archives and Records, 35 (2), 110–25. McCarthy, G. and Evans, J. (2012) Principles for Archival Information Services in the Public Domain, Archives and Manuscripts, 40 (1), 54–67. McCarthy, G., Morgan, H. and Daniels, E. (2016) The eScholarship Research Centre: working with knowledge in the twenty-first century, The Australian Library Journal, 65 (3), 147–156, doi: 10.1080/00049670.2016.1208073. McCarthy, G., Smith, A. and de Villiers, A. (forthcoming) Repatriation Knowledge in the Networked Archive of the Twenty-first Century. In Return, Reconcile Renew: the history, effects and opportunities of repatriation (working title), Springer. McKemmish, S. and Piggott, M. (eds) (1994) The Records Continuum: Ian Maclean and Australian Archives first fifty years, Ancora Press. McKemmish, S., Upward, F. and Reed, B. (2010) Records Continuum Model. In The Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, 3rd edn, CRC Press. NAA (National Archives of Australia) (2015) What We Keep: principles for selecting the Australian Government’s national archives, http://www.naa.gov.au/Images/what-we-keep_tcm16-88809.pdf. O’Neill, C., Tropea, R. and Selakovic, V. (2012) Access to Records for People Who Were in Out-of-home Care: moving beyond ‘third dimension’ archival practice, Archives and Manuscripts, 40 (1), 29–41. Ormond-Parker, L. and Sloggett, R. (2012) Local Archives and Community Collecting in the Digital Age, Archival Science, 12 (2), 191–212. Quarrell, S. R., Arabi, J., Suwalski, A., Veuille, M. and Wirth, T. (2017) The Invasion Biology of the Invasive Earwig, Forficula auricularia in Australasian Ecosystems, Biological Invasions, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-017-1646-3. Russell R. and Winkworth, K. (2009) Significance 2.0: a guide to assessing the significance of collections, Collections Council of Australia Ltd, https://www.arts.gov.au/what-we-do/museums-libraries-andgalleries/significance-20. Silcock, J. L., Witt, G. B. and Fensham, R. J. (2016) A 150-year Fire History of Mulga (Acacia aneura F. Muell. ex Benth.) Dominated Vegetation in Semiarid Queensland, Australia, The Rangeland Journal, CSIRO, 38 (4), 391–415, https://doi.org/10.1071/RJ15109. Smits, T. (2016) Making the News National: using digitized newspapers to

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study the distribution of the Queen’s Speech by W. H. Smith & Son, 1846–1858, Victorian Periodicals Review, 49 (4), 598–625, Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/vpr.2016.0041. Swain, S. (2014) Stakeholders as Subjects: the role of historians in the development of Australia’s Find & Connect web resource, The Public Historian, 36 (4), 38–50. TNA (The National Archives) (2012a) Appraisal Policy, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/informationmanagement/appraisal_policy.pdf. TNA (2012b) Tracing Your Caribbean Ancestors: A National Archives Guide, rev. 3rd edn, Bloomsbury. Turnbull, P. (2016) Managing and Mapping the History of Collecting Indigenous Human Remains, The Australian Library Journal, 65 (3), 203–12. Vargha, D. (2018) Windrush Scandal: a historian on why destroying archives is never a good idea, The Conversation, 24 April, https://theconversation.com/windrush-scandal-a-historian-on-whydestroying-archives-is-never-a-good-idea-95481. Wickman, D. (2003) The Failure of Commonwealth Recordkeeping: the Stolen Generations in corporate and collective memory, Comma, 1, 119. Wilson, J. and Golding, F. (2016) Latent Scrutiny: personal archives as perpetual mementos of the official gaze, Archival Science, 16 (1), 93–109.

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CHAPTER 4 Trusting the records: the Hillsborough football disaster 1989 and the work of the Independent Panel 2010–12 Sarah Tyacke

This chapter is not about the disaster of 1989 itself. It is about the implications for archives and for the role of archivists, specifically as a result of the work of the Independent Panel set up in 2010 to research the events of the disaster (Report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel, 2012 (hereafter RHIP)). Although the work of the Panel ended in 2012 the legal consequences of the issues raised are still being considered in 2019 and records continue to be used (and indeed new ones managed) with the professional help of records managers and archivists. Background The Independent Panel which reported on the disaster was a response to the perceived needs of society for transparency as represented, in this case, by the long-standing expressed requirements of the people most affected by the man-made tragedy which killed 96 people – crushed to death, standing together, in locked football-ground pens at the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield on 15 April 1989. The response by the government in 2010, first Labour and then Conservative, was to establish an Independent Panel to review the evidence anew. For the families of those who lost their lives and the survivors, this disaster was, and is, a conflicted history, causing much personal pain to them, many of whom have been involved for over 25 years, and still are, in trying to obtain justice.

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The families fought for the truth, which had been publicly disputed from the day itself, although the causes of the disaster had been more or less established by the Taylor Public Inquiry in its interim and final reports of 1989 and 1990 (RHIP, 186–225). They wanted the truth about what had happened on the day to be recognised by the media and the rest of society, and in particular by the government. In the press and elsewhere the blame had been firmly placed on the football fans themselves and this view was commonly believed, except by the families of those killed and many Liverpudlians. The coroner’s unusual ‘generic’ inquests of 1990, which considered the causes of the 95 (eventually 96) deaths together rather than individually had returned a verdict of ‘accidental death’ for the 95 who died (RHIP, 255–91). This verdict remained a running sore for the families that, in their view, did not apportion blame to anyone and did not tell them what had happened on the day, nor why they had subsequently got such a bad press. The subsequent judicial inquiries and legal cases brought by the families had also failed to satisfy them and they had continued to press for action. The Independent Panel Hence the Independent Panel in 2010–12. The Panel itself was unusual: it was not a judicial inquiry and its composition was critical to its success. This aspect is important because the members of the Panel needed to have the confidence of all parties involved, the families, the government, the organizations involved, including the police, as well as the wider public. Thus, the panel was a mixture of people and skills relevant to the issues before it. Bishop James Jones, Anglican bishop of Liverpool (1998–2013) was the chair. Others were Raju Bhatt, one of the founding partners of Bhatt Murphy, lawyers who specialise in the protection of civil liberties; Paul Leighton, then retired as Deputy Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland; Peter Sissons, a well-known name in TV newscasting to advise on handling the media; and Professor Phil Scraton, Professor of Criminology at Queen’s University, Belfast. His research includes controversial deaths and institutional responsibility, the rights of the bereaved and survivors in the aftermath of disasters. On the information front there were two

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Panel members: Christine Gifford, then a member of the national Advisory Council on Records and Archives and a recognised expert on access to information and formerly with the Metropolitan Police, and myself, formerly Keeper of Public Records. We were joined by Katy Jones, a television executive producer and an investigative journalist. She was the factual producer of Jimmy McGovern’s Hillsborough TV drama documentary shown in 1996. The medical expert was Dr Bill Kirkup, Associate Chief Medical Officer in the Department of Health who had been involved in previous investigations requiring medical expertise. He had to break the medical news to the families that the victims had not all died before 3.15 p.m., as had previously been assumed at the first inquests. Bishop James Jones reflected on the significance of this new understanding in 2017: ‘None of us will ever forget the day the Panel reported to the families in the Cathedral [on 12 September 2012]. Dr Bill Kirkup made a presentation of his analysis of the pathology reports which changed everything. It made a deep impact on the families. Indeed, it was this section of the report that led the Attorney General to apply to the High Court to quash the verdicts of the original inquests.’ Bill Kirkup’s expertise and the relevant records had produced this outcome. Thus the Panel was composed of respected experts in their own fields, including an archivist and an information specialist; this was because the Panel’s work was to be document based and not judicial. There would be no lawyers representing the parties concerned, nor witnesses being called under oath. It was again unusual in that the experts, including the archivist and the information specialist, were on the Panel itself rather than being called to give evidence as expert witnesses as at a judicial inquiry. They had primary roles in discovery and publication rather than the usual predominantly ancillary ones. Documentary focus of the Panel As mentioned, the terms of reference of the panel are significant: they were document or record focused: • to disclose fully the documentation; • no redaction of the content of the documents except according to

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the agreed and published disclosure protocol; • to establish an archive of documentation with a catalogue in consultation with the Keeper of Public Records; • to consult with those most affected by the tragedy; • to produce a report to illustrate how the information disclosed adds to the public understanding. Given the time that had elapsed, the objective of the panel was to establish what could be said which was new in respect of establishing the truth after 20 years. This was of course different from dispensing justice as a court would do, which would have entailed much stricter rules of admissible evidence in order to lead to any convictions. But the Panel’s new and relevant evidence did cause the first inquests to be quashed and new inquests agreed. Since the Panel was deliberately not judicial it had no powers to enforce disclosure or summon witnesses, e.g. private firms involved, the Football Association, Sheffield Wednesday Football Club, the families’ and others’ lawyers could all refuse to allow access to their records, citing legal privilege, and some were indeed reluctant; the coroner, for example, was reluctant to allow access, since coroners’ records, although under the Public Records Acts, are protected from disclosure for 75 years. The government records had not been made publicly available, but were all made available to the Panel as requested. In fact, by persuasion and negotiation the Panel gained access to the records of 85 organizations; not necessarily all the records were available in the end, but certainly enough which were relevant ‘to add to public understanding’ of the causes of the disaster. The Panel reviewed over 450,000 pages of just under 13,000 documents and any audio-visual material they could discover. The largest group of records was those of the South Yorkshire Police deposited in Sheffield Archives: the implications of which I shall come back to under the matter of the status of Police Records in England and Wales. The role of records management and archiving While the archivist on the Panel was a full Panel member and contributed to the discussions on all matters, it is clear that it was

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records management and archiving which were the basic critical activities, without which the Panel could not work. These tasks were undertaken by the records managers and archivists in the various organizations and by archivists specifically employed and attached to the Panel’s work. This turned out to be a vast undertaking and a team of archivists were appointed to deal with particular groups of material, notably but not exclusively the records of the South Yorkshire Police. The team established in Sheffield Archives under the guidance of the Archives and Local Studies Manager Peter Evans were Claire Fowkes, Ian Johnson, Joanne Shortland and Morag Fyfe. Others added the work to their normal jobs: David Stoker, the archives manager in Liverpool, and all those responsible for records management in government and other organizations which held or were thought to hold relevant documents all contributed the catalogue entries essential for finding the material. Thus, irrespective of the legal or other outcomes from this research, there would be one lasting result: there would be permanent access to the records themselves via a permanent archive which the Panel decided should be digital. This was not a simple task. First, some new relevant records had to be found which would cast light on the various events of the day and on the subsequent actions of the police and others involved. Older records also had to be reexamined, for example, those relating to the 164 altered versions of the police witness statements, of which 116 had material removed critical of the police; the pathology records relevant to the designated 3.15 p.m. cut-off time for deaths; records of the discussions and activities of the police, lawyers and organizations after the disaster. From this, the research implications had to be understood and demonstrated in the report, with the digitised documents to provide the evidence. Publication of the records Once the records were discovered, the difficult issues of data protection and redaction and obtaining the agreement of the bodies concerned to publish the records remained. As one archivist put it: Ensuring that various stakeholders understood that redaction was only applied to personal data or other identifying information; it was not to hide the content. Ensuring that punctuation was still visible so

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it was clear what had been redacted. We seemed to be able to plough through a large amount of data and second check it amongst ourselves but it seemed to get stuck with the owning agency checks. (Archivists’ communication to the author, 2013)

In spite of these problems the resulting online publication of the records showed that the whole exercise was transparent and that the records were authentic and reliable and thus could be generally accepted as trustworthy. For archivists, the need for records to be what they say they are (authentic) and from a reliable source (provenance) is of course axiomatic, but to some of the contributing bodies this criticality had to be spelt out. Records and historical truth The Panel’s conclusions, which were generally accepted on publication of the report in 2012, were based almost entirely on the records disclosed to it. While records are often said to speak for themselves, in reality they never do of course, but need to be interpreted in the light of the investigation taking place. The questions of ‘who was responsible’, ‘why did it happen’, ‘who knew what when’, ‘who said what to whom and when’ were assessed by the various members or groups of the Panel depending on their expertise and the records disclosed to them. Given that the conclusions of the earlier Taylor Report in 1989–90 had been disputed and alternative causes put forward in the media and elsewhere, the Panel was particularly interested in how various allegations about the behaviour of the fans had arisen and whether they could be substantiated, in particular those emblazoned on the front page of The Sun in 1989. The newspaper’s headline was ‘The Truth’ and the paper claimed that some fans picked the pockets of victims, some urinated on the brave cops and some fans beat up a policeman giving the kiss of life. It was not until 25 years later that The Sun finally admitted that these were false reports, that the police had smeared Liverpool fans to deflect blame and that 41 lives could have been saved. While the report had made matters clear, the public recognition on 12 September 2012 by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons

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(Hansard, 2012) of the injustice which had been done meant that there would be a legal re-examination of the evidence as produced by the Independent Panel and a set of new inquests for each individual who died. The Panel’s work was to establish historical truth, which is not the same as any legal, judicial judgment; but, as events proved, nonetheless it produced an impact on British society. As one survivor of the disaster put it in a newspaper article: ‘this tragedy was no longer mine or other survivors or of the families it belongs now to the nation as a wake-up call …’ (Tempany, 2012) Thus the verdict of accidental death was quashed and the new inquests took place in 2016 and a new verdict of unlawful killing was given. At the time of writing in 2019 legal proceedings against some individuals are taking place. Some record and archival implications While the role of the information specialist and archivist and the main outcomes of the Panel’s work were as described above, there were also some record-keeping and archiving results. Some of the records had of course been available in the various repositories and used in previous inquiries. In particular, copies of the police witness statements were accessible in the House of Lords Library but had not received an in-depth investigation as to the changes made. Apart from the critical importance of having the police and other records made available to the Panel, the obvious practical result was the digital archive which was recommended in Part 3 of the Independent Panel’s Report. This is the records as assembled by the work of the Hillsborough Independent Panel 2010–12. It comprises a number of elements: these are the master catalogue and the documents in digital form, which form the foundation for the Panel’s Report and were published on the website in 2012. Where, for reasons of data protection, records were not published (for example some videos of the events), the originals are listed with their locations so that it is clear where they may be found and consulted in person. The master catalogue provides access to the original documents, including the police records held at Sheffield Archives.

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Digitising the record Given the unified digital access for everyone via the web, it did not seem sensible to contemplate bringing all the originals together in one physical place, provided that they were all catalogued and available in digital form. The Permanent Archive of the originals is thus a Distributed Digitised Archive combining the central government records transferred to The National Archives (TNA) at Kew and the local records transferred to Sheffield and to Liverpool Archives and to other places of deposit as appropriate. Thus, the website is a critical part of the Permanent Archive, since it holds material digitally which may be inaccessible in its original form elsewhere. Digital archiving of records used in evidence and the advantages of permanent access wherever required are obvious, all the more so as the first approach to researching a subject is increasingly online nowadays. The Panel website is already archived at the National Archives at Kew. The Hillsborough Archive is the website, and is a digital memorial to the ‘96’. At the time of writing in 2018 the website is unavailable to the public, for legal reasons while the court cases proceed, although the records themselves are still preserved digitally. Archival issues still outstanding from the Panel’s work: no external oversight of police records of national or historical importance in England and Wales In the course of the Panel’s work it was of some surprise and concern to the Panel that police forces in England and Wales are not subject to the Public Records Acts (PRAs,) nor to any other external oversight. Scotland and Northern Ireland have police records within their public records systems. Thus the concern was, and is, that there is no obligation to preserve police records of national importance, nor to make them accessible in a routine way to the public and to ensure that this is done with the oversight/supervision of a body which is not the police, for reasons of public trust and transparency. Those that do survive may be deposited in a record office or archive but they remain inaccessible to the public unless the police authority agrees to allow access to them. Police

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authorities are subject to the Local Government Act 1972 and the Act includes a requirement to keep records, but this is regarded as weak and with limited enforcement capability, especially in respect of historic records, i.e. those 20 years old or more. Thus in many cases the documentary evidence that they have left is poor. This led to the recommendation in Part 3 of the Panel’s report that police force records be brought under legislative control and that police forces be added to Part II of the First Schedule to the Public Records Act 1958, thereby making them subject to the supervision of the Keeper of Public Records. (RHIP Pt 3, 369–77). So far little has happened in respect of this recommendation either to pursue it or to suggest other ways forward. This is in spite of a commitment under the ‘Open Government partnership UK national action plan 2013–15’, which established a high-level working group to ensure greater transparency and accessibility of police records in England and Wales. In 2013, as reported by the Liverpool Echo (Graves, 2013), the then policing minister, Damian Green, said: the work of the Hillsborough Independent Panel showed how hugely significant information can be found in historical police records and we should learn from their experience. It makes sense to consider how to bring the police in line with other public bodies, including the government, which already makes records accessible after a certain period of time. The government is determined to ensure the work of the police is as transparent as possible and this working group will explore how this might affect police records.

The working group was to report back by 30 June 2014 to ministers. The hope was that over time records management and archiving (retention and disposal schedules) might be established so that the claim made by the South Yorkshire Police that they could have destroyed the records, if they so wished, will not continue to be true. The College of Policing (2013) has issued guidance on police records management but it is clear that at the six-year point there is a requirement to review whether it is still necessary to keep the record for a policing purpose. The review process specifies that forces may retain records only for as long as they are necessary. Records may be kept for historical or academic purposes but should be clearly

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designated as such and, as before, there is no legal obligation to do so. In the view of the Panel, and indeed other commentators, such records of national historical importance should be selected for permanent preservation and made available in due course to the public and held in a public archive; this should be done under the supervision, or at least the oversight, of an outside body which is trusted by the public, not by the police force itself. This is not about the status of the records; it is about preserving records of national and enduring importance to society over long periods of time which can, in due course, be consulted by the public. Conclusion The debate about the archival and indeed the archivist’s role in social justice issues has been considered in the literature for a number of years (Harris, 2007). The experience of the Hillsborough disaster and its continuing conflicted aftermath is a prime English example of a social justice matter. The work of the Independent Panel confirms Duff et al.’s (2013) conclusion that ‘the potentiality of archives to impact on social justice may lie dormant until they are utilized and fed into the public arena’. Indeed, the case of the altered police witness statements, previously dismissed as a ‘normal police exercise’, which had been accessible from 1997 but not re-investigated until 2010, confirms this conclusion. Archivists and records managers do not regard it as their business to influence public issues of the day, except perhaps if they can in record-related ones. But once those public issues are set they do have an important role to play by informing the ensuing inquiry or investigation and contributing their professional expertise. Of course, this presupposes that the organization undertaking the inquiry recognises the value of records and archives, and records managers and archivists, as well as lawyers and other experts. As Terry Cook (Tyacke, 2001) used to say, archivists and records managers need to get out of ‘the basement and into the boardroom’, or, in this case, onto the Panel. The impact therefore of the work of the Independent Panel in emphasising the importance of the record to its deliberations and the outcomes for the people involved in the disaster of 1989 has been important. Although other public inquiries may be differently

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constructed, the discovery and use of the records by record managers and archivists, together with the other relevant experts, in investigating older or historical matters of public concern is surely obvious, especially when memories will have faded or will be faulty. As Moss and Thomas ( 2017) have commented: ‘it seems inevitable that archives will play an increasing role, not just as cultural institutions, but also in the judicial space, whether providing records to support the increasing number of public inquiries and claims against the executive, or allowing historians to judge the past in the court of history’. There is a further point: increasingly the requirement of all researchers and the interested public is that relevant records of whatever period need to be available to them online. These need to be shown to be authentic and reliable and thus trustworthy, notwithstanding the problems of online fake news and the like. The Hillsborough records have those characteristics of authenticity and reliability and were explicitly recognised as making a significant contribution to the results of the Panel’s work. References College of Policing (2013) Information Management: retention, review and disposal, https://www.app.college.police.uk/app-content/informationmanagement/management-of-police-information/retention-reviewand-disposal-of-police-information. Duff, W. M., Flinn, A., Surtaam, K. E., Wallace, D. A. (2013) Social Justice Impact of Archives: a preliminary investigation, Archival Science, 13 (4), 317–48. Graves, S. (2013) Hillsborough Independent Panel will change the way police records are made public: Home Office working group to be established, Liverpool Echo (4 November). Hansard, House of Commons (2012) Prime Minister’s statement on Hillsborough, 12 September, https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2012-09-12/debates/ 12091223000003/Hillsborough. Harris, V. (2007) Archives and Justice: a South African perspective, Society of American Archivists. Moss, M. and Thomas, D. (2017) Overlapping Temporalities –the Judge, the

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Historian and the Citizen, Archives, 52 (134), 51–66. The Report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel (2012) Stationery Office (HC581), https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-report-ofthe-hillsborough-independent-panel. Tempany, A. (2012) A survivor’s view. The panel did a fine job, now let’s have justice, Guardian 14 September, 8. Tyacke, S. (2001) Archives in a Wider World: the culture and politics of archives, Archivaria, 52, 1–25.

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CHAPTER 5 Sharing history: coupling the archives and history compilation in Japan Sachiko Morimoto

Introduction The first modern archives in Japan were set up in Yamaguchi prefecture in 1959. The trigger for the adoption of the idea ‘archives’, when only libraries or museums had existed, was the deposit of the Mōri Family Papers to the prefecture in 1952. The Mōri family were feudal lords who governed the Yamaguchi prefecture area and the papers were administrative records of the Mōri clan in the early modern era, comprising 50,000 items. The best way to preserve and utilise this priceless collection was explored and the director of the prefectural library at that time came across the idea of archives. He studied western literature on archival science to design the system. The National Archives of Japan was set up in 1971. The system was based on western archival science, including T. R. Schellenberg’s Modern Archives, which was translated and studied while planning the establishment of the National Archives. Since then, many archival institutions have been created in both the public and private sectors. The concept of the archival system is now more or less rooted in Japanese society, but there is a tradition of a kind of amalgamation of history compilation and archival functions. In this chapter the background which led to shape this tradition is analysed and its possible future development is discussed.

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History compilation in Japan The official history compilation tradition in East Asia The influence of Chinese culture is historically dominant in East Asian countries and the compilation of official history of the rulers is a part of it. The oldest existing chronicle in China is Chunqiu [Spring and Autumn Annals], which is a chronicle of the Lu dynasty from 772 BCE to 484 BCE. However, it is understood that the earliest official history is Shiji [Records of the Grand Historian] and the 24 titles, including Shiji, are together called 24 Official Histories. They cover the years from circa 90 BCE to 1739 CE (Takeuchi, 2002, 2–4, 102–3). The essential nature of the official history is that it is a project of the imperial order. Although the first four titles were originally written by individual historians and officially approved after completion, later systems included the emperor’s order for the compilation of the history of the preceding dynasty. Plenty of documents must have been created and stored to enable the writing of history, but the Chinese tradition was to compile them into a historical text to be shared within society, rather than to share the documents as they were. This tradition gradually spread to other East Asian cultures. Official history compilation in Japan Japan was no exception in this regard. It is assumed that writing using Chinese characters was introduced into Japan by the fifth century CE. The Japanese were quick to embrace the tradition of history compilation, too. The first official history comprised two books: Tennōki [Emperor’s Chronicle] and Kokki [Chronicles of the Nation], completed in 620 CE, but these were lost in a fire. The oldest existing official history is Nihon Shoki [Chronicles of Japan], which was completed in 720 CE. This official history was compiled by imperial order. What is different from the Chinese approach is that the scope of one title is not defined by the dynasty, as there had been no interruption or change in the Japanese dynasty. An emperor would order the initiation of the compilation project, which would last for a few decades, producing a title containing the history of multiple emperors’ reigns. There are six official history titles in Japan which together range

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from the age of myths to 887 CE. The compilation project for the seventh title was started but was not completed. The emperor’s ruling power gradually weakened in the 11th century and this led to the seizure of the official history compilation of the nation. Direct rule by the emperor resumed after the Meiji Restoration political movement and ended de facto rule by the warrior class in 1868. The compilation of the official history following the sixth title was quickly ordered by the Meiji emperor. About 80 staff members were working for the official history compilation division in the central government in 1875. The immediate initiation of the project and the size of the division clearly indicate that it was given priority in the newly established government. This will be discussed in more detail later in the chapter. History of records management in Japan Ancient and medieval archives It goes without saying that the written tradition was established in Japan before the compilation of histories began. The need for managing documents was felt shortly after the introduction of letters from China. Apart from the letters inscribed on swords or pottery, which were spiritually significant or symbolic rather than informative, the oldest documents handed down to date are Shōsōin Monjo (Shōsōin Imperial Storage Archives), which date back to the eighth century. They are records of Buddhism sutra copying works, written on reused papers. Paper was a very precious commodity in those days, and the writings on the back, or the original content, are taxation records, family registers, instructions from central government to local governments, or reports from the latter to the former. The oldest information recorded here is a family register of 702 CE. Shōsōin Monjo archives show that the written tradition in government was well established by the eighth century. Plenty of medieval (from around the 12th to 16th centuries) archives survive today. Archives of various social communities survive, but the larger collections are often the archives of Buddhist temples which have continued, despite the vicissitudes among ruling powers. The most famous is Tōji Hyakugō Monjo (Archives of Tōji Temple Contained in One Hundred Boxes) (Kyoto Institute, Library and

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Archives, 2012). These archives consist of over 25,000 documents which were created between the eighth and 18th centuries and are typical administrative records of the temple; that is, land titles, minutes of meetings and so on. One hundred boxes were donated for preservation in the archives by the feudal lord Maeda Tsunanori in the 17th century and the original order was correctly preserved at the time and safely handed down the generations. Early modern archives After the Tokugawa Shogunate was established in 1603 Japan enjoyed a peaceful period for over 250 years. During this early modern period, the solid system of government, with the Tokugawa Shogun at the top, was supported by written communication, down to the lowest commoner class. Orders from the Shogun government or feudal lords were delivered by letters to the village masters and were copied and bound by the masters in order to record the orders dispatched to them. In the villages, rice crops were collected as tax and each farmer was asked to sign his name himself on the taxation document. In the urban areas, orders addressed to the townspeople were written on standing signboards. Not all farmers could write their names properly, nor could all townspeople read and understand the orders themselves, but the very existence of these systems indicates that the society was already widely controlled by textual communication.1 It was important to know the precedents and conventions in a stable society where people more or less followed their inherited family business. Records management was well developed and ensured that such information was shared among the community over time. Based on recent studies about early modern records management practices in different societal settings, it is now well known that records were created, managed and preserved in proper order, and we can reconstruct the administrative system of those times. Archives in modern Japan The encounter with archives As shown above, records were well managed and utilised in the government of communities. One of the indispensable functions of

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archives is that they are open to the wider society, but this was not the case in Japan until the 20th century. The first Japanese encounter with archives was in 1873 in Venice. An embassy consisting of important central government figures was touring the United States and Europe to negotiate the revision of treaties between Japan and the countries of the West, as well as to study western civilisation. When the embassy visited the archives in Venice and saw an old Japanese letter sent by a Japanese feudal lord to the Pope in the 16th century they were very impressed and understood that an archival system was indispensable to a civilised society (Kume, 1980, 350–4). The first university in Japan, the University of Tokyo, was founded in 1877 and was expanded and reorganized as the Imperial University in 1886. Ludwig Riess of the University of Berlin was invited to teach history at that time. His Japanese colleagues included Kumazo Tsuboi, who had studied history at several universities in Europe including the University of Berlin; Kunitake Kume, who had accompanied the above-mentioned embassy and written the official report; and Genpachi Mitsukuri, who had once visited the Vatican Archives. They did not choose their places of study at random but had a clear idea of what to study and where. In the margin of a student’s notebook in one of the compulsory lectures given by Tsuboi, a memo on ‘Jean Mabillon’ (founder of the disciplines of palaeography and diplomatics) can be found (Hyosuke Murakami Papers). With Riess laying the foundation, modern historical science and diplomatics learned from the European academic world took root in higher education by the end of the 19th century. Tradition of history compilation in modern Japan As we have seen, soon after the restoration of imperial power in 1867 the government launched an official history compilation project. This symbolised the return of the imperial order and the emperor’s reclamation of power from the shogun and the warrior class. In addition to the retrospective project, the government initiated a parallel project to compile a contemporary history to prove its legitimacy. In 1872 the former feudal lords and aristocrats were ordered to submit their records to be used by the government to compile Fukkoki [Record of Restoration]. The government also ordered

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the local governments to compile the history of their development since the 1867 restoration (Miyaji, 2000, 48–56). The official national history compilation project was handed down from the central government to the Imperial University in 1886. Riess strongly suggested that instead of compiling the official history the project should concentrate on collecting and arranging source materials. This proposal was accepted and the idea of compiling the official national history by imperial order was finally abandoned. On the other hand, almost simultaneously, in 1888, the Imperial Household Department independently ordered four leading families to summarise their contribution to the restoration and submit it to the Department. The four families were Shimazu (Kagoshima region), Mōri (Yamaguchi region), Yamanouchi (Kochi region) and the Mito branch of the Tokugawa family (Ibaraki region). They set up their own history compilation projects to respond to the order.2 Other former feudal families followed and the idea of compiling one’s own history became so widespread that equivalent projects emerged one after the other all over Japan. The Japanese knew of the western archival system in the 1870s. The compilation of official national history was given up by 1890. However, the idea of an archival system never took root and never replaced the tradition of history compilation. There are two main reasons for this. First, knowledge of archives was shared only among teachers and students of the Imperial University. It was never disseminated to the wider society and many history compilation projects, carried out all over Japan, had no connection to the highly academic discussions. Second, Japan was under imperial government and the idea of democracy which underpins the modern archival system was alien to it. The government was responsible only to the emperor and there was no provision for subjects or third parties to have access to records created by the government. This may be familiar to western readers too, if they recall the ruling system before the French Revolution. Japan would have been one of the earliest nations to set up a national archives if one had been established immediately after the encounter with the archives in Venice in 1873. However, this did not happen and instead the tradition of history compilation became widespread.

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Archives and history compilation today Re-encounter with archives In 1951 the Monbusho Shiryokan (Archives of the Department of Culture and Education) was set up. Despite its name, it was not an institutional archives for the department but collected and preserved mainly early modern archive collections created by families of the former ruling class, aristocrats, major merchants and so on. These families lost their economic privilege after World War 2 and their archives began to be dispersed. Shiryokan was set up to save them. The Yamaguchi Prefectural Archives was set up eight years later, in 1959, and is the first institutional archives in Japan. Although the trigger was the donation of the former feudal Mōri family papers to the prefecture, Masachi Suzuki, the then director of Yamaguchi Prefectural Library, based the prefectural archives on modern archives theory and prioritised the preservation function. The number of archives in the public sector is shown in Table 5.1. Around 37 out of 47 prefectures now have archival systems in some form.3 It is not easy to count how many private sector archives have been set up as it is not compulsory for private organizations to have archives, and there is no system to collect information about them. Yet it is well known that there are many archives in various private organizations, including businesses and schools.4 Table 5.1 Number of archives in the public sector Parent organization

Number

National government

7

National university

14

Local government (prefecture)

37

Local government (city)

30

Local government (town)

6

Local government (village)

0

Public organization

16

Source: National Archives of Japan, www.archives.go.jp/links.

Continuing the tradition of history compilation Even though the number of archival institutions is gradually growing

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they have not replaced the long-standing and widespread culture of history compilation. Many organizations compile their ‘official history’ to commemorate their 10th, 50th, or 100th anniversaries. I have deliberately used the adjective ‘official’, as they are edited under the auspices of the organizations themselves and are never published as the work of individual historians. The government order for the prefectural contemporary history compilation project was officially rescinded in 1886, but many prefectures continued to compile histories of their own volition. The National Diet Library online catalogue shows that the oldest was published by Osaka prefecture in 1902, and 25 of 47 prefectures had compiled their histories by the end of World War 2. After World War 2 local history became a major trend in historical science and supported high-quality local government history compilation projects. The rapid recovery and development of the economy also steered the initiation of history compilation projects at all levels. There are 16,048 titles compiled by city governments since 1945, which can be found in the online catalogue of the National Diet Library.5 These include the by-products of projects, such as archival catalogues, photo publications and abridged versions. The number above does not strictly relate to the number of the projects but, considering that the number of cities in Japan was 205 in 1945 and 790 in 2017, it is easy to see how common it was for local governments to compile their histories. Needless to say, the same tradition can be found in towns and villages. As for businesses, the earliest Shashi (history of the company) is said to be that compiled by the Fifth National Bank in 1896 or by the Hankai Railway Company in 1899 (Murahashi, 2002, 9). After the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) and Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), the Japanese economy became stronger and industries became internationally competitive. This led to flourishing history compilation projects in the business sector. Based on the research by Katsuko Murahashi, 13,165 titles were published between 1877 and 2000 (Murahashi, 2002, 10). In addition to all levels of government and businesses, schools and other kinds of organizations have compiled their own histories. This practice is deeply embedded in Japanese society.

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The unique tradition of sharing history in Japan It is clear that, with over 1,500 years of history compilation in Japan, the tradition is so deeply rooted that it never disappeared even after the introduction of the concept of modern archives. A unique combination of the two has been invented here in Japan. In most cases, the compilation project is initiated without an archival institution to support it. To begin with, the project team searches for and collects source materials from the parent organization and from related individuals or organizations. When the compilation project terminates after the publication of the official history it is realised that there is a need for a place to preserve all the materials accumulated during the course of the project. At this stage the idea of an archives is introduced and the history compilation team turns into an archival section. Thus, typical archival collections comprise both the parent organization’s records and the various collected archives and continue to function as both institutional and collecting archives. This affects us, as we often consider compiling history and preserving archives as very closely connected, sometimes even inseparable. Table 5.2 on the next page shows whether the parent organizations of the major archives have published official histories. It is remarkable to see that, on average, over 90% of organizations have done so. The relationship between the archives and the history compilation project of the parent organization is analysed in Table 5.3. The information has been collected mainly through web-based research. In local government bodies half of the archives are closely related to history compilation projects and a quarter are an amalgamation of the two. This is also true for universities, and the connection between archives and history compilation projects tends to be even closer for private universities. As there is no legal obligation for them to follow the freedom of information legislation, and with less pressure for accountability, private universities prefer to utilise archives to tell their own history in order to present their unique value to society. Table 5.3 shows clearly that 55 (38 plus 17) out of 64 (93 minus 29), or 85.9%, of private university archives are closely connected with history compilation.

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Table 5.2 Organizations which have archives and an official history Parent organization

Number of archives

Having official history

Local government

128

123 (97.6%)

Business company

66

55 (83.3%)

National/public university

21

20 (95.2%)

104

93 (89.4%)

Private university

Source: National Archives of Japan, institutional membership lists of the Japan Society of Archives Institutions, the Japanese Association of College and University Archives and Business Archives Association (BAA).

Table 5.3 Relationship between the archives and the history compilation project Parent organization

Having official history

Relationship with the history compilation project Present Predecessor organization in charge in charge

Different section in charge

Relationship not identified

Local government

123

30

32

42

19

National/public university

20

4

9

4

3

Private university

93

38

17

9

29

Source: As Table 5.2 but excluding BAA members.6

To summarise, Japan has encountered the idea of archives twice in its modern history and it has taken root deeply, as can be seen in the establishment of many institutions. However, the long-standing tradition of history compilation was never superseded and the two have found a way to coexist to their mutual benefit. Conclusion In the ‘history compilation to archives’ tradition, archives tended to place value on a commitment to historical research rather than on fulfilling their responsibility as impartial preservers of the information of their parent organizations. However, this is gradually changing. The Act on Access to Information Held by Administrative Organs (1999) was the turning point, as it made clear that proper record keeping was indispensable to make it possible for organizations to respond to the

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newly introduced information disclosure system. This propelled discussion in the archival sector that the role of institutional archives should be given the highest priority. The Public Records and Archives Management Act (2009) further promoted this trend. Although the law is applicable only to government organizations at the national level, local government bodies are also encouraged to follow the same practices. Japanese archives have traditionally placed equal weight on preserving parent organizations’ records and the collection of private archives, but the balance is changing in favour of the former. This balance will be further enhanced in the age of accountability. At the same time, there is no doubt that Japanese organizations will continue to launch history compilation projects periodically. Having such a project is considered to be indispensable in order to share common values and collective memory within the community. This is concisely stated in the editor’s note of 75 Years of Toyota: ever-better cars, as follows7: one of the important objectives of compiling our corporate history is to enable our younger and future employees, who will lead the next generation, to inherit our corporate essence. In other words, we need to relay to them the spirit at the time of our creation, as well as the corporate culture and climate that took root, in a way they can feel deep down inside so that they will be moved and have pride in their company. (Toyota Motor Corporation, 2012)

A director of a business archives who works for a major electronics company said that a company whose staff shares its history is powerful, the best example being Toyota. An official history will not be needed to promote the legitimacy of the imperial rule in the 21st century, but such histories now play a role in helping community members to find their identity and a feeling of belonging. This is why official histories need to be compiled by the organizations themselves, and not by individual historians. At present Japanese society has archives in various organizations with highly educated and trained professional archivists. With established archives operations, the history compilation projects will enjoy a high standard of work with less effort than before. The key to

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a successful marriage of the two is the pride and independence of both functions. Notes 1 Yasuo Saito asserts that there were more than 15,500 private schools for primary education, called Terakoya, in the mid-19th century and nearly half the male population and 15% of the female population had basic reading, writing and mathematics competency at that time (Saito, 2012, 52–3). 2 The project also worked to protect important archives of those families. For example, Mōri family papers were handed down to be organized and used for this project by the family history compilation section and were later donated to the Yamaguchi prefecture to form the core of the prefectural archives, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. 3 Several prefectures do not have dedicated archival repositories but run archival services as extensions to the record management systems. This solution is preferred during the current recession, but the future is uncertain as it is difficult to assert the need for a professional staff and may also lack proper storage. 4 The membership of the Business Archives Association is 91 and that of the Japanese Association of College and University Archives is 97. 5 The search condition was that the term ‘shishi (history of the city)’ is contained in both title and author. Therefore, if the term is contained in only one or in none, e.g. the title is Photographic Memory of the City, and the author is the city as a whole, such titles are excluded. It is assumed, therefore, that there are even more titles published. 6 The membership is under the name of the parent organization for BAA and it is impossible to specify the archival section in each company. Therefore, BAA members are excluded from the analysis for Table 5.3. 7 The information on Toyota’s initiative was provided by Dr Yuko Matsuzaki, an independent business archives specialist.

References Act on Access to Information Held by Administrative Organs (Act No. 42 of 14 May 1999) www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/law/detail/?ft=1&re=02&dn=1&x=43& y=18&co=01&ia=03&ky=access+to+information&page=21.

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Hyosuke Murakami papers, F0041/03, The University of Tokyo Archives. Kume, K. (1980) Tokumei zenken taishi beiou kairan jikki [The Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary’s Report of the Tour around the United States and the European Countries], reproduction vol. 4, Iwanami-bunko. The original was published in 1878. Kyoto Institute, Library and Archives (2012), The Hyakugo Archives Web, http://hyakugo.kyoto.jp/eng. Miyaji, M. (2000) Meiji jidai no shiryo shūshū to hozon [Collecting and Preserving Historical Sources in the Meiji era]. In Ishii, M. et al. (eds), Konnichi no komonjogaku [Diplomatics of Today], vol. 12: Shiryo hozon to monjokan [Preservation of Historical Materials and Archival Institutions], Yuzankaku. Murahashi, K. (2002) Shashi no kenkyu [A Study of Company Histories], Diamond Co. Ltd. National Archives of Japan, www.archives.go.jp/links. Public Records and Archives Management Act (Act No. 66 of 1 July 2009), www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/law/detail/?ft=1&re=02&dn=1&x=51& y=12&co=01&ia=03&ky=public+records+and+archives+management+act &page=3. Saito, Y. (2012) ‘Shikiji-noryoku, shikiji-ritsu no rekishiteki suii: Nihon no keiken [Study of the Historical Transition of Literacy Ability and Literacy Rate in Japan]’, Kokusai Kyoryoku Ronsyu, 15 (1), 51–62. Takeuchi, Y. (2002) ‘Seishi’ wa ikani kakarete kitaka: Chugoku no rekishi wo yomitoku [How the Tradition of Compiling ‘Official History’ was Established: analysis on Chinese history], Taisyukan shoten. Toyota Motor Corporation (2012) 75 Years of Toyota: ever-better cars, www.toyota-global.com/company/history_of_toyota/75years/index.html.

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CHAPTER 6 Memories of the future: archives in India Swapan Chakravorty

The beginnings of archives in colonial India Archives have always been more about re-collecting the future than the past. In a neglected essay titled ‘Memories of the future’ the well-known Shakespeare and Middleton scholar Gary Taylor wrote that ‘We can imagine the future only by recollecting the past’ (Taylor, 1996, 237). Archives ‘re-member’ not simply by collecting materials from the present and the past, but also by selecting and organizing them, so that each act of collecting or ‘re-collecting’ is also at the same time an act of forgetting. ‘All the futures of the past are inaccurate’, writes Taylor (Taylor, 1996, 246). Human technologies of memory are designed to overcome the limitations of bodily memory, irrespective of whether we think of the ‘body’ from the viewpoint of a ‘naive physicalism’ or a ‘naive mentalism’. One may think of the ‘memory’ as unselfconscious of visceral processes or as cognizant of the consciousness as ‘embodied’ and of the body ‘enminded’ (Searle, 1984, 13–27). Neither position would make a difference to the perceived function of technologies of memory. While our memory-machines do the remembering for us, we aim to marshal memories for our use and to fashion a memory bank for the future the way that we would like to imagine it. Such attempts were made in western arts of memory, such as in the place-rhetoric or topoi since Aristotle and the pseudo-Ciceronian Ad Herennium (Moss, 1996, 8). In the twelfth century, Hugh of St Victor in his De arca Noe mystica raised the machine universitatis, a memorial ark

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which had elements of the mappa mundi and of linea generationis, on a tablet or page of a book (Carruthers, 1990, 231–9). Hamlet is probably thinking of such a tablet (or ‘table’) when he swears to erase all ‘trivial fond records’ from the ‘table of [his] … memory’ and admit ‘Within the book and volume’ of his brain only his father’s commandment to seek revenge (Shakespeare, 1988, Hamlet, 1.5.98–103).1 God had inscribed his commandments to Moses in written letters, and Hamlet does likewise with his father’s injunctions. Writing is an aid to cultural memory. Keeping records on clay tablets helped Ashurbanipal to centralise power and claim in 668 BCE that he was ‘King of the Universe’. Ashurbanipal taught himself to read cuneiform scripts, including Sumerian, Akkadian and Old Babylonian Akkadian, and maintained clay records in his archive in ancient Nineveh, near what is now the war zone in Mosul (Puchner, 2017, 24–45). ‘Memory connects lawlessly’, wrote Taylor, although not all neuroscientists would agree (Taylor, 1996, 248; Eichenbaum, 2002, 171–310).2 Taylor, however, may be right as far as collective – and necessarily selective (Taylor is writing about ‘cultural selection’) – cultural memory goes. It was with the hope of curbing the lawlessness of varieties of cultural mythos, especially when the indigenous archives were being built to configure the lost history of a subjugated people, that the projects of building archives in colonial India were born. I will return to archives in particular shortly, but a look at the dates and purposes of building comprehensive collections at the beginning of the 20th century will illustrate my point. The Imperial Library was founded in 1891 by bringing together several secretariat libraries. In 1903 the Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, merged the Imperial Library with the collections of Calcutta Public Library, a public-cumsubscription library started by Indian and European residents of the city in March 1836 (Nair, 2011, 3–8). The Imperial Library’s collections were not accessible except by government officials until 1903, when they were opened to the public at the city’s Metcalfe Hall on Strand Road. At the inauguration of the newly augmented Imperial Library, Viceroy Curzon outlined its policy of acquisition: The general idea of the whole Library is that it should contain all the books that have been written about India in popular tongues, with

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such additions as are required to make it a good all-round library of standard works of reference. (National Library, India, website)3

This strikes one today as being no more than the first step towards what is now the apex depository library of India, the National Library in Calcutta (Calcutta is now officially known as Kolkata, except in titles and institutions that have retained the old form. The latter are so cited here.) Gurnek Singh quotes from a report in The Gazette of India published on 30 January 1903: The Imperial Library in the Civil Secretariat Buildings at Calcutta, formed a few years ago from the different Departmental Libraries, has proved of some service in this direction … With the approval of the Secretary of State, the Governor-General-in-Council has accordingly decided to establish such a library at Calcutta … and the books and shelves of the Calcutta Public Library, which has long ceased to fulfill the intentions of its founders, have been purchased from the proprietors … It is intended that it should be a library of reference, a working place for students, and a repository of material for the future historians of India, in which, so far as possible, every work written about India at any time can be seen and read. (Singh, 2015, 516)

Consider the moment. In January 1904 that the Curzon administration would announce its intention to divide Bengal along sectarian lines, and the partition would eventually be executed in July 1905. The resulting boycott of British goods, the so-called swadeshi movement (from swadesh = one’s own country), led to the reunification in December 1911, when the capital of colonial India moved from Kolkata to Delhi. Reunification came at a high price: a few regions of Orissa, Assam and Bihar were carved out from the former province of Bengal. Meanwhile, the revolutionaries in Bengal were trying out violent and covert means to dislodge colonial rule from at least 1907 (Sarkar, 1973, 71–2; Ghosh, 2017, 27–91). The political stir was accompanied by protonationalist movements that were broadly intellectual. In July 1893 the Bengal Academy of Literature was founded by Europeans and Bengali residents of the city, with support from patrons in other parts of

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undivided Bengal. In April of the following year the official name was translated into Bengali – Bangiya Sahitya Parishat (Kumar, 1974). Compare the stated purpose of Lord Curzon with that for the Parishat as declared by its secretary, Ramendrasundar Tribedi, at the first session of the Bangiya Sahitya Sammelan [Bengali Literary Conference] at Kashimbazar with Rabindranath Tagore in the chair. The address contained a proposal for a new museum and library in Halsibagan in Kolkata, where the Parishat is currently located. The year was 1908, five years after the opening of the reorganized Imperial Library and three years after Bengal was partitioned leading to political turbulence. One of the aims of the movement, as also of the museum and library, was to reconfigure a Bengali ‘nationhood’. The word often used was jati, which could mean race and caste. After proposing a range of projects that would imagine a ‘nation’ into being through cultural archaeology, Tribedi dreamed up his ideal library: Next to the temple would be a library that would house all books – written, printed, unprinted, published and unpublished – in the Bengali language. Old manuscripts collected from all parts of Bengal would be gathered there. The literary fruits of a millennium of continuous effort could be seen collected and housed in a single place. Any account of Bengalis written in the languages of travellers ranging from ancient Greece and Rome to modern America and Japan would also be found there. Data relating to the geography, history, language, literature, society and religion of Bengal gathered by the British government in the past and those being currently compiled, as also facts and figures collected by private efforts, would also be stored. (Tribedi, 1965, 533)4

Tribedi is thinking more of an archive for Bengal than of a library. He includes manuscripts and unpublished materials, and a data bank with genealogies in the library’s collections. As if that were not enough, he imagines a museum which would house sculptures, portraits, paintings and photographs – all that is connected with Bengal’s cultural legacy, including the cannon balls from the Battle of Plassey of 1757 (at which the East India Company defeated the Nawab of Murshidabad and effectively conquered Bengal) and the pen of the pioneering Bengali novelist Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (or

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Chatterjee). In addition, there would be local botanical and zoological specimens, coins, epigraphic exhibits, pottery and textiles – a collection that would provide visitors with a conspectus of a ‘nation’ forged by exhibits and relics (Tribedi, 1965, 533–4). The chairperson at the meeting, Rabindranath Tagore, may have been suspicious of such promiscuous abandon. When considering the duties of a librarian, he had expressed more faith in smaller collections where users would be invited as guests to share in the collector’s pleasure (Tagore, 1996, 601– 2). Tagore’s English essay, which has a Bengali version, was first read in 1929 at the All-India Librarians’ Conference and was later printed in the Visva-Bharati Bulletin in January 1935. That, however, was some years into the future. Tribedi anchored the identity of the Bengali jati on an archive founded, ironically, on a western (and, pari passu, ‘modern’) idea of ‘history’, exemplified by the Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Indian Museum that grew out of the Society’s collections.5 The instance is similar to the German archive or Bundesarchiv, built in the early 19th century, preceding the birth of the German nation-state. As Peter Fritzsche and Elizabeth Yale have observed, it was hoped that the relics of the past would configure a German ‘nation’ threatened by the ambitions of France. The Nazis converted the archive into a racial one, weeding out more than it included (Fritzsche, 2005, 184–208; Yale, 2015, 341–2). One worries about the future of Indian archives now, when even the Taj Mahal is being claimed by majoritarian groups to have been a Hindu temple (Oak, 1989).6 As with the western ‘archive fever’, Tribedi’s archival route to the birth of a modern Bengali ‘nation’ begs many questions. Who is a Bengali? Did undivided Bengal speak only one language? Why are indigenous peoples ignored? Why is there such emphasis on Brahman scholars and hardly any mention of Muslims? Why preserve the genealogies of the big landowners or zamindars? Cultural selection, we recall, is a matter of organizing the memory of the future. Of course, following the inscrutable logic of cultural selection, Tribedi’s priorities are no longer those of our times. In addition, an independent country called Bangladesh has built its own state archives, the National Archives of Bangladesh (in Bengali, Bangladesh Jatiya Archives), to trace an alternative trajectory of Bengal’s ‘national’ history.

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The Imperial Record Office and local efforts Indians were piecing together their own cultural memory in a ‘national’ archive while their colonial masters were tidily hiving away public documents to centralise power, just as Ashurbanipal had done in the seventh century BCE. Archives may have been built to ease governance, but the colonial powers in the 19th century also used archives, as Elizabeth Yale writes, as ‘a key technology of rule’ (Yale, 2015, 333). Jacques Derrida has argued that the impulse to archive, to commit to material traces an imagined ‘real’ or ‘originary’ history (the archē presumed in the word ‘archive’), is not remote from a violent desire to stabilise memories – necessarily fugitive – and rule out alternative accounts (Derrida, 1995, 57; Yale, 2015, 334). The drive is necessarily political, unwilling to admit acts of re-membering that may unsettle agreeable narratives. This is evident with developments that followed the upheavals and revolutions in 19th-century Europe. Archival ‘clauses’ of the 18th century, that allowed the transfer of records to annexing states, were sharply defined as imperial archives in European powers such as France and altered legal provisions and suppressed materials to suit imperial objectives. Serviceable archives were now deemed the major gauge of historical reasoning, and superseded cultures were in danger of losing control over their own stories (Aziz, 2017). The latter were either silenced or selectively canonised. Aziz cites the instance of Charles Hamilton’s 1791 translation of the Hedaya, the 12th-century manual of Islamic law that follows the Hanafi tradition, one of the four major schools of Sunni jurisprudence (Aziz, 2017). It was commissioned by Governor General Warren Hastings, presumably to fix it as the definitive source of Islamic law at the expense of other Sunni schools of Sharia such as Maliki, Shafi’i and Hanbali, not to mention Shia and minor sects outside the Sunni pale. Several decades later, the colonial administration passed the Press and Registration of Books Act to control and archive publications (Standing Committee on Information Technology, 2012). The year was 1867, a decade following the great Indian rebellion. The Act is still in force in free India, the last amendment having been tabled in the lower house of Parliament, the Lok Sabha, in 2011 (The Press and Registration of Books and Publications Bill, 2011, Forty-Second Report). Archives served in colonial India not simply as sources of

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official control of information and engineered history: they were also approved source materials for international negotiations, such as in situations involving border disputes, international trade and maritime traffic. One might compare remote instances of such political and economic use of archives. Yale recalls the work of Filippo de Vivo, who demonstrated that Venice’s rise to economic power in early modern Europe could be related to its careful construction of archival records and to such practices as compiling indexes (Yale, 2015, 337; Vivo, 2010, 231–48). On 11 March 1891 the Imperial Record Department (IRD) was opened in Kolkata with nine members of staff. The office was moved to New Delhi after the shift of capital, but not immediately. The work of removing public records to a custom-made building was completed in 1926. After the transfer of power in 1947, the archives of divided India came to be called the National Archives of India. The Hindi name is Rashtriya Abhilekhagar Bharat. In the past, India was used to the word muhafizkhana, which was derived from the Arabic hafez (hifz = protection), meaning a person who is the custodian of the Qur’an, usually one who has memorised the text, and hence who preserves the holy word. Extending the reach of the term, muhafizkhana was used to denote a collection of land and revenue records and important documents. It was perhaps in order to avoid the religious connotation of muhafiz that the newly free, secular and partitioned state, scarred by the violence of sectarian riots and mass migration, chose the Sanskritised abhilekhagar, which simply means a record room. In Jammu and Kashmir the word muhafizkhana is still in use, as in the Muhafiz Khana Bemina in Srinagar, which houses land settlement records. It is not as if India before the IRD was a stranger to archives. The nobility maintained records and libraries, such as those studied by John-Paul Ghobrial in his book on information flow in European capitals (Ghobrial, 2013, cited in Yale, 2015, 339). Religious orders also maintained records. A few princely states (vassal states, ruled by semisovereign Indian princes over whom the British exercised mediated control), such as Hyderabad and Rajasthan, had official archives. The Goa archives preserved records dating back to the 17th century (Prasad, 1978, 52). Private collectors built archives because of professional and scholarly requirements, and occasionally for public

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benefit. The outstanding music composer and ruler of the princely state of Travancore, Swathi Thirunal Rama Varma, built the Oriental Manuscript Library and the Trivandrum Public Library (now State Central Library Kerala). The latter, established in 1829, is believed to be the first public library in India, started seven years prior to the Calcutta Public Library. The first President of the Public Library Committee was Colonel Edward Cadogan, acting Resident of Travancore and grandson of Sir Hans Sloane, whose bequest laid the foundation for the great collections of the British Library and Natural History Museum in London. Varma was only 33 years old when he died in December 1846 (Paslithil, 2006, 23–44). Another instance is the Buhar Library, currently part of the National Library in Kolkata. It was founded in the 18th century by an official of Nawab Mir Jafar of Murshidabad, named Sayyid Sadr-ud-din of Buhar, in present-day West Bengal. Sayyid Sadr-ud-din was Mir Jafar’s munshi or senior clerk, who later served Warren Hastings. The Jalaliyah Library, as it was once called, was extended by his great-grandson Munshi Sadrud-din Ahmed (1843–1905), who gifted the collection of Arabic and Persian manuscripts, in addition to printed books in Arabic, Persian and Urdu, to the government in 1904 (Radavî et al., 1921–23). However, the early crop of Indians to be taught the western curriculum believed that Indians had no sense of history or archival consciousness, and no textual technology to support historical memory. Indian learning, even abstruse Brahmanical learning, was chained to the art of oral and aural memory or sruti (Fillozat, 1950, 122–35).7 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, the great Bengali novelist and thinker, wrote a review essay ‘Bangalar itihas’ [‘The History of Bengal’] in his journal Bangadarshan in 1885. In it he laments that Bengalis, as a jati, which can mean both race and nation, lack a history – history as discourse, not as past.] The cause of national pride is the composition or development of the history of the material life of the people; history is the root of social science and social progress. A nation [jati] without history is destined to suffer untold ills. There are an unfortunate few who do not know the names of their forefathers; and there are a few races [jati] that are ignorant of the achievements of their forebears. Bengalis belong to the first rank of those unfortunate races [jatidiger].

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Chattopadhyay thought that the one scholar who could have attempted a comprehensive history was Rajendralal Mitra. Mitra was thoroughly versed in Eastern languages and Western protocols of textual scholarship through his work for the Asiatic society (Chattopadhyay, 1994, 2, 285–7). Chattopadhyay himself shouldered the responsibility of writing about the origins of the Bengali race, and in 1872 it was Bangadarshan that carried the Bengali version of the proposal for the founding of a Bengal Literary Academy (titled sahitya samaj or ‘literary society’ in Bengali), drafted by John Beames, civil servant and scholar of Indian history and languages (Beames, 1939– 40, 169–78).8 Local efforts at building up archival materials for constructing the history of the jati may not have been a bad thing. Like Chattopadhyay, the amateur antiquarian Akshaykumar Maitreya believed that the history of the Bengali race was yet to be written. In 1897–98 he started the first journal in Bengali exclusively devoted to history, Aitihasik chitra [Historical Representation]. The quarterly was published with intermittent breaks until 1911–1912. In essays such as ‘Bangalir itihas’ [‘The history of the bengalis’, 1907] and ‘Aitihasik rachana-garaj’ [‘The urge to write history’, 1914], Maitreya observed that Bengalis needed to study palaeography and languages, including local dialects, to create an archive of narratives, folklore and material relics and to examine evidence before reaching conclusions. He attacked the encyclopedia compiler Nagendranath Basu for arriving at theories, especially those concerning caste, with his mind made up, for preferring hearsay and dubious genealogies to textual criticism and archaeology (Maitreya, 2014, 8–10, 32–6). A ‘native’ archive built on ‘western’ lines, it seems, could effectively combat native divisiveness and privilege. In September 1910 Maitreya, along with colleagues such as Saratkumar Ray and Ramaprasad Chanda, established Barendra (or Varendra) Anusndhan Samiti in Rajshahi (now in Bangladesh), a society for collecting and research on the antiquities of northern Bengal (Chaudhuri, 2014, xiii–xvi). The professed purpose of establishing the IRD was to facilitate administration, which it undoubtedly did. But it was also a major means of constructing ‘history’ for the colonised people, which by the latter’s own admission it lacked. To rule is to survey, examine and archive the territories ruled, and efforts towards this started long

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before the opening of the IRD. Sana Aziz draws attention to the survey of acquired territories in southern India by Colonel Colin Mackenzie after the defeat and eventual death in combat of Tipu Sultan of Mysore in 1799 (Aziz, 2017). One could say the same of the archaeological landscapes produced in careful drawings by the army officer Alexander Cunningham, who excavated sites such as Sarnath (1837) and Sanchi (1850) (Imam, 1966; Chakrabarti, 1999; Singh, 2004). The ruins served as the latest in the layers of a historical palimpsest, a vanquished civilisation that the archaeologist must interpret and the colonial government must govern. Symbols of colonial rule were embedded in such surveys and maps: ‘The insinuation of the symbols of British power into an Indian landscape suggests the naturalness of that power’ (Barrow, 2003, 3). Even careful cataloguing could prove inconvenient. As Aziz notes, the work of Mackenzie was handed over to H. H. Wilson and William Taylor, ‘Indologists’ with hardly any knowledge of the languages of southern India. Mackenzie’s collection was dismissed as ‘nonhistorical’, as evidence that Indians encountered by the collector were incapable of distinguishing truth from falsehood (Mantena, 2007, 399– 401, cited in Aziz, 2017). Womanhood and sexuality hardly figured in the colonial archives, and some scholars have used this lack to create alternative archives and narratives in free India (Arondekar, 2009; Lal, 2011, 93–110). I was fortunate to have supervised research that led to the creation of such an archive of photographs of women in Bengal, inside the domestic space and without, between 1880 and 1970 (Biswas, 2017).9 The National Archives of India is currently a department of the Union Ministry of Culture, advised by a National Committee of Archivists, with the director general of the National Archives as chairperson, and the executive heads of state archives (that is, the main archives of the administrative divisions known as ‘states’, such as the state of Kerala) as members. Archives follow the Archival Policy Resolution adopted by the Union government in 1972, although protocols and practices may, and do, vary (Prasad, 1978, 53–7). In spite of the Resolution, many government ministries delay sending records to the National Archives, and state governments often fail to deliver gazettes to the National Library. It is good to learn that the historian Mushirul Hasan, appointed director general of the National Archives

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in 2010, was able to persuade government departments during his tenure to deposit old records. Documents had decayed in the intervening years, and equipment for preserving them was rumoured to have fallen into disrepair. One hopes that the neglect was not part of a willed oblivion. At least one report in the New York Times, published in 2017, sounded upbeat about the institution’s future (Patel, 2012). The value of archives: control versus liberation Concealment is part of the way that archives construct the memory of the future. For secretive regimes, data compiled on the governed is the key to power. When secret files are declassified or when an oppressive government falls, such information may serve as a means of redress. Throughout the world the opening of government archives and police files has led to reparations and trials, the ‘Holocaust Collection’ being a major example. The opening up of archives of atrocities and trials followed the civil war in Guatemala and the end of apartheid in South Africa (Weld, 2014; Harris, 2007 cited in Aziz, 2017). South Asia is no exception. Digital technology has loosened the government’s grip on archives; citizens and non-government trusts are shaping their own archives alongside official ones. The 1947 Partition Archive, based in Berkeley, California and Delhi was started in 2010 by Guneeta Singh Bhalla as an oral history project, and crowd-sourced narratives and memories of the 1947 partition of India – one of the largest and most grisly forced mass migrations in modern history – were invited from around the globe. The Muktijuddho e-Archive (Bangladesh Liberation War e-Archive in English), the records of which were made accessible in 2016, and the Bangladesh Genocide Archive aim at recording eyewitness accounts and documenting images and texts related to the genocide and rape in East Pakistan in 1971 - atrocities that are still leading to trials and sentencing (BBC News, 2016). The value of archives in independent South Asia in the age of big data, when private and government archives may draw on Facebook and Instagram for information on citizens, lies in their paradoxical functions as instruments of control and freedom (Mayer-Schönberger and Ramge, 2018, 157–79). The more the Indian state, for instance, compels citizens to link unique identification numbers to bank

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accounts and financial instruments, the heavier is the bulk of data that leak out through television footage, digitised online documents, social media, replies to queries under the Right to Information Act of 2005 and, of course, lax security. Tagore wanted his ideal library to be small, discerning and hospitable. His niece Sarala Debi, a radical nationalist although close to Gandhi, also wanted libraries to house a discerning collection. In an address delivered at the Bali Public Library and published in the journal Bharati in 1924, Sarala Debi seemed to share many of her uncle’s ideas – not just the ones Tagore later expressed in his 1929 address, but also those in one of his earliest essays (Thakur [Tagore], 2010, 388–90; Debi, 1924, 129–34). Yet she felt that the libraries of rich patrons and the nobility were useless because they denied access to relevant users. Sarala Debi mentions Nineveh and Alexandria, and it is clear that she is thinking of ‘archives’ as much as of ‘libraries’. She hopes that readers would assist custodians of collections, help them to share information more than hoard it. Sarala Debi was ahead of her times in judging the value of archives. The fiery political fighter in her knew that access to archives could turn the rules against the rulers, and mechanisms of control into those of liberation. Notes 1 This sentence and the two preceding ones draw on one of my earlier essays on early modern theatre, Chakravorty (2009, 57–8). 2 On the neuroscience of human memory, see Eichenbaum (2002, 171–310). 3 The official website of the National Library, India, accessed 1 March 2018. For the history of the National Library, India, see Kesavan (1961). See also Nagaraj and Ghosh (1978). 4 The ‘temple’ referred to is dedicated to Bengal imagined as mother. Unless otherwise stated, all translations from the Bengali are mine. 5 On the early history of the Indian Museum and its roots in the Asiatic Society, see Chowdhury et al. (2017, 19–47) and Das (2014, 9–29). 6 The theory was reiterated by Vinay Katiyar, a senior leader of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in October 2017. See Katiyar (2017). 7 Fillozat believed that archival practices came to India with the Persians before Alexander’s invasion, and despite exceptions such as Kalhan’s Rajatarangini (12th century CE), there was hardly any archival work

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before the arrival of colonial powers. For a corrective view, see Aziz (2017). . A more extended survey of the imperial policy on archives in India is to be found in Bhattacharya, passim. 8 Chattopadhyay’s own historical essay ‘Bangalir utpatti’ [‘The Origin of Bengalis’] was serialised in Bangadarshan in 1881–82 (Chattopadhyay, 1994, 2, 297–312). 9 The co-supervisor of Biswas’s thesis was Professor Anirban Das of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. The digital photographic archive is housed at the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University.

References Arondekar, A. (2009) For the Record: on sexuality and the colonial archive in India, Duke University Press. Aziz, S. (16 December 2017) National Archives of India: the colonisation of knowledge and politics of preservation, Economic and Political Weekly, [online] 52 (50), 33–9, http://www.epw.in/journal/2017/50/perspecctives/national-archivesindia.html?0=ip_login_no_cache%3Dc2ea75feb1cb594aec94f14bf43dba9a. Barrow, I. J. (2003) Making History, Drawing Territory: British mapping in India, c. 1765–1905, Oxford University Press. BBC News (2016) Bangladesh War Crimes Trial: key accused (4 September), www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-20970123. Beames, J. (1939–40) Bangiya sahitya samaj [Literary Society of Bengal], Bangadarshan, 1 (3), 1872. Collected edition in 9 volumes, Vol. 1, National Literature. Bhattacharya, S. (2019). Archiving the British Raj: History of the Archival Policy of the Government of India, with Selected Documents, 1858-1947. Oxford University Press. Biswas, H. B. (2017) Spatializing the Visual: re-locating women’s photographs in Bengal, 1880s–1970s, unpublished PhD thesis, Jadavpur University, India. Carruthers, M. J. (1990) The Book of Memory: a study of memory in medieval culture, Cambridge University Press. Chakrabarti, D. K. (1999) India, an Archaeological History: palaeolithic beginnings to early historic foundations, Oxford University Press. Chakravorty, S. (2009) Hypocrite Lecteur: reading on the early modern stage.

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In Chaudhuri, S. (ed.), Renaissance Themes: essays presented to Arun Kumar Das Gupta, 1st edn, Anthem Press. Chattopadhyay, B. (1994) Bankim rachanabali [Collected Works of Bankim]. Volume 2. 12th emended reprint, ed. J. Bagal, Sahitya Samsad. Chaudhuri, I. (2014) Akshaykumar Maitreya: 1861–1930. In Patra, S. and Bhaumik, S. (eds), Akshaykumar Maitreya smarakgrantha [Akshaykumar Maitreya Commemorative Volume], 1st edn, Ashadeep. Chowdhury I., Radavî, Q. H., Muqtadir, A., Maulavi, K. B. and Ḥusain, M. (eds) (2017) The Lives of Objects: stories from the Indian Museum, Indian Museum. Das, S. (2014) Jadughar: 200 years of the Indian Museum 1814–2014, Indian Museum. Debi, S. (1924) Library, Bharati, 48 (2), 129–34, http://dspace.wbpublib