Are Potential Archives Disappearing?

It looks like the 2011 census may be the last time that statistical information is collected from the British public in the traditional way. Apparently, it will cost around £482 million which does seem like quite a lot.

I suspect that, as an archives worker, I should be horrified by this news but, if the same kind of information is being collected cheaply from the myriad other databases of information that now exist, maybe it will not make a huge difference to archives of the future?

Besides, because there is an 100 year closure period on personal information from censuses, we can only inspect up to the 1901 census which was carried out by enumerators who went around houses and interviewed the inhabitants. The last few censuses were just dropped off to be filled in by people themselves and there is no telling what nonsense and mistakes they contain.

In 2001, for instance, several Star Wars fans put down 'Jedi' as their religious affiliation in an effort to see it officially recognized as a faith. Perhaps the new proposed methods will be more accurate.

What worries us here is emails. Yes, they are speedy and wonderful and we are no technophobes; technology has made cataloguing and finding archives so much easier, but vast swathes of our correspondence is disappearing. People delete emails and indeed entire email accounts and all of those letters are gone forever. The press were ridiculing Tony Blair and Gordon Brown for being slow to cotton on to electronic mail a few years ago but at least we know that their papers will eventually be available for posterity.

The Balfour collection, Margaret Tait's papers and the hundreds of deposits made by the public are full of exciting, heart-breaking, furious, funny and passionate letters which can provide a clear view of contemporary life on the day that they were written.

Will we still be reading emails, blogs and websites from today in three hundred years time? Am I perhaps the millionth person to have made this, by now quite tired, point?

War HUH! What is it GOOD for? Absolutely NUTHIN'.. (say it again wooooo)

If you have enjoyed watching Tony Blair squirm during the Iraq enquiry, or indeed, wish to have a break from him constantly referring to 911 in an attempt to link that event with Saddam Hussein in the public mind, then pop down to the Archive and read about all the other wars!

We have publications, personal documents, correspondence, diaries and photographs from World War 1 and World War 2. You can read newspapers clippings and telegrams which follow the process of the Spanish American war of 1898 and the Boer war (reference D47/2/11).

Why not come in and read the correspondence between Isabella Wilson and her brother Andrew who moved to America, ran up hideous debts and signed up for the American Civil War to escape them? (Reference D1/538)

We also hold a pair of medals from the Second Afghan War of 1878 - 1880 in collection D94.

And much, much more...