Cape Town -
The Western Cape provincial archives are one of a few “isolated pockets where good is being done” in an otherwise “disgraceful” state of the national archives.
A damning report on the state of the national archives, recently released after two years of research and analysis by the Archival Platform (a joint UCT/Nelson Mandela Foundation project), states: “Today the national archival system is in trouble. Good work is being done only in isolated pockets. Simply put, the system is not delivering.”
MEC for Cultural Affairs and Sport Theuns Botha said the provincial archival records were managed in accordance with provincial law and complied with regulations.
Asked about the apparently healthy state of the Western Cape’s archives in Roeland Street, Verne Harris, director of research and archive at the foundation, said: “We did say there were islands where good is being done” and the Roeland Street facility was one of them.
Botha said records were stored in 50 stack rooms in buildings in Roeland and Caledon streets.
“Strict security measures are in place to protect them from theft and other perils.”
The records management section does audits in governmental bodies and presents courses to records-management and registry staff to ensure the safe-keeping of their archival records, Botha said.
Security measures at the archives included locked stack-room doors, registers for the records supplied to the reading room, and CCTV cameras in the reading room to ensure neither staff nor the public damage them.
The report says public archives have been unable to transform themselves into active documenters of society, nor to fulfil their mandated role of co-ordinating and setting standards for the archival sector as envisaged in the 1990s.
Oral history projects are common, but are random and undertaken in problematic ways.
The huge potential of digitisation in support of preservation and public access has not been harnessed.
Botha said a digitisation project is under way in the Western Cape which will reduce physical handling of original records as high-quality electronic images will be available online.
Sunday Argus