Why archives want to destroy their reams of papers and risk a digital dark age The costs of storing tons of documents on miles of shelves means they’re being banished from state archives. But is it too risky […]

The costs of storing tons of documents on miles of shelves means they’re being banished from state archives. But is it too risky Tom Jeffreys investigates

A man takes an old book from a shelf. Armed with a pair of scissors and a sharp knife, he slices down the back of its spine, breaks open the binding, and separates out the pages. These are trimmed in an electric guillotine and placed inside cardboard boxes. Leftover bindings are thrown unceremoniously into a plastic bin, while the pages are readied for the digitisation machines.

For those raised on a belief in books as the pinnacle of civilisation, this scene is horrifying – all the more so for where it takes place: the National Archives of Finland. Archives, after all, are places of conservation, not destruction.

But not, it seems, for long. Sweden and Hungary are also cutting open their books, and legislation enabling the institution here in Helsinki to dispose of its documents after digitising them is being finalised. Is this necessary?

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Archives are not museums, and their priorities are not the same. “The National Archives are not about paper, but the data that the papers are covered with,” says Deputy Director General Markku Nenonen. While the National Archives do contain a number of rare and beautiful objects, its bread and butter is information.

This information comes from government departments, private citizens, communities, corporations and third sector organisations. It comes, for the most part, on paper. But if we understand that information is the priority, then the form it takes is only secondary.

We should also consider that these books were not conceived as books. Many of them consist of sheaves of individual documents bound together some years after they were first produced, and many comprise fragile papers especially vulnerable to damage from the very glue that is holding them together. What may look like vandalism is in fact contributing to the longevity of the document through better storage.

The problem with conserving all this paper is that you need somewhere to put it, and that costs money. The National Archives of Finland currently has documents covering over 100km of shelf space. Documents requiring a further 130km are expected to come in over the next 35 years. To cope with the influx, a new repository is being built 140 miles away. The prime motivation behind digitisation is therefore cost-efficiency, especially with Finland is in its fifth year of recession.

However, digitisation is not just about efficiency. “Ultimately, this will be beneficial for citizens,” says Juha Haataja, Counsellor of Education at the Ministry of Education and Culture. “They will be able to access information much more easily.” For researchers, digitisation opens up new methods of searching, collating, and exploring information.

Of course, there are concerns too. For example, in the absence of a knowledgable member of staff to guide you, digital archives place increased emphasis on database functionality. Already, Finland has seen a number of different systems emerge, each with slightly different search mechanisms. In the UK, a study by Loughborough University has expressed concern over a “proliferation of standards and formats” for digital archives. In fact, total standardisation has proved an elusive goal throughout the entire history of archiving.

Today, we tend to assume that digital files are permanent, don’t degrade and don’t need looking after to the same extent as physical materials. But this is an illusion: think only of your own MiniDiscs, VHS tapes or floppy disks.

Numerous archivists and IT researchers express concerns about a possible “digital dark age” – a future scenario in which today’s carefully digitised files become inaccessible as their technology is rendered obsolete.

In Finland, every file is digitised in three formats to help militate against such developments – and in different locations to protect against good old-fashioned fire. And for now, the advantages of digital over paper archives seem undeniable. As Reko Etelävuori, Senior Research Officer at the National Archives, puts it: “Metadata will be the new glue that holds our documents together.”

This article originally appeared in The Long + Short, the free online magazine of ideas published by Nesta, the UK’s innovation foundation