“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
These famous words of George Santayana embody why it is we have a British Library archiving our history of written English. It is a vital resource for our country; a reference to explain how we have evolved; a resource to learn from what we did well and not so well, and an archive to provide as definitive a record of events – major and minor – as it is possible to compile.
Written English is incredibly important – we recognise this in setting legal requirements for the retention of documents and records going back centuries. Increasingly urgently, though, we as a society need to get far more serious about retaining and storing electronic written English.
Whether we like it or not, websites are today’s books, journals and newspapers. A vast amount of information, opinion, spontaneous reaction to events is created every single day on the web. A lot of this is electronic bric-a-brac, not necessarily valuable to anyone other than the creator and perhaps a few friends or subscribers, but much more of it is of historic significance.
Take just one massively important historical event we have recently experienced: the election campaign of Barack Obama and, wider than that, the entire US presidential election race. One of the central planks of President Obama’s election success was the way he used the internet to engage American voters in a way no-one has previously managed.
That election-winning website is no longer online. Nor, incidentally, is Hillary Clinton’s campaign website charting her epic, breathtaking and ground-breaking battle with President Obama for their party’s nomination. Both gone. Forever?
Let me offer an example local to me. In the run-up to the 2006 local elections, the Labour party in Wandsworth built up a successful and well-visited local website setting out the policies we adopted for that election. More than that, every item of literature sent to residents during that campaign was put on the website and available for download by the visiting public; indeed, some of the items we put up there never had a print version – they were only ever available online. Our opponents locally did the same as, indeed, right across the country local campaigns were being fought on the web, possibly for the first time.
We still have a copy of our site stored locally but it’s no longer available to the public. Every day, more and more similar electronic archives are lost. And this is living history: it is no less valid simply because it is reached through a screen rather than a bound sheaf of papers.
There are countless other examples. The BBC, for example, in 1997 had a first stab at an election website beyond anything that had been attempted before. It was a pale imitation of what the BBC was capable of by the 2005 General Election and you can find one or two pages still online from that election; but the site itself and all the information it contained – on candidates, constituencies and the day-to-day issues that shaped that campaign – has gone.
In short, as more and more of what we do is conveyed by websites, and less and less by conventional “hard copy” media, more and more of our historical archive is going to be jeopardised. If we don’t start thinking about how we can preserve electronic as well as written English, future generations are, in practice, going to find that history stopped around the start of the 21st century.
Well not quite, because written records continue but, given how quickly the internet has grown and how rapidly other written communications, such as letters or newspaper hard-copy sales, have declined, we cannot be certain that that will be true in perpetuity. Across the country, local newspapers are closing down – as I know locally with the loss of the Wandsworth Borough News after more than a century of local news. That means a traditional source of archival research for local and national historians is now no longer available.
This is happening locally. It’s happening nationally. And it’s happening internationally. Of course, this isn’t an issue of as immediate importance to everyday lives as the recession, or the quality of our NHS or our schools – nor is it an issue that will sway a single vote come the election.
But, for all that, I think it’s hugely important that we start saving our electronic history in just the same way that the British Library is archiving our written history. We can’t – alone – leave it to librarians and archivists to do this – they cannot archive entire websites – and I am uneasy at just leaving it to ever-more powerful internet companies like Google to cache pages for however long they choose to do so.
The British Library is doing enormously important work digitising our existing, priceless archive of written English – giving us access to books so frail that they have been kept entombed for decades. They are also starting to turn their attention to capturing our electronic history as well but the scale of this task is daunting: even though we are still in the advent of the electronic era, the volume of web content dwarves the written archive of the British Library. We need an entirely new, separate British Library solely devoted to the archiving of our electronic history. But we need it sooner rather than later, before an entire generation of electronic English is lost forever.
Stuart King is Labour’s parliamentary candidate in Putney. He has a website at www.stuartking.net
Read/leave comments