The B.C. government has failed as a steward of public records. It should take immediate steps to have 10 years’ worth of stored documents properly archived and institute procedures so it doesn’t fall behind again.
Elizabeth Denham, information and privacy commissioner, says that since 2003, the government has been shipping historical documents to a warehouse instead of preserving them in the B.C. Archives. She says 33,000 boxes of documents are in static storage, with 3,000 more boxes arriving annually.
The problem dates back to the Liberal government’s core review of 2001-02, when it shifted the B.C. Archives to the Royal B.C. Museum, but gave the museum only enough money to store records existing at that time. The museum did not have the resources for ongoing archiving, and so decided to charge the government $454 to archive each additional box of records.
Since ministries’ budgets have not allowed for archiving, no government documents have been transferred to the archives since 2003. Instead, the boxes are sent to a warehouse where they are stored at a cost of $6.72 a box, says Denham in her report, A Failure to Archive — Recommendations to Modernize Government Records Management.
While it’s understandable that budget-conscious ministries would choose to warehouse documents at a fraction of the cost of archiving them, cataloguing and preserving official records is not a luxury, it’s a necessity. It’s obvious that the archives form a vital component of the province’s recorded history, but it’s about far more than providing research material for future historians.
The government has delved into the B.C. Archives as it sued tobacco companies to recover health-care costs, for example, and to help courts assess aboriginal land claims and allegations of abuse in schools and hospitals.
Although ostensibly saving money by storing the records instead of having them archived, the government is incurring other costs, as members of the public must file freedom-of-information requests for material that should be readily available for free from the B.C. Archives.
Finding the appropriate records among boxes in warehouses is a clumsy and costly way to retrieve information. It means sorting through many irrelevant documents to find the right ones.
Denham, who holds a master’s degree from the University of B.C.’s School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, says the government must revamp the process for handling records, from when the records are created to final disposition.
“Good records, properly created, organized, stored and classified are critical for government’s success across the thousands of services that it provides, manages or authorizes,” she says.
This especially holds true for the increasing number of electronic records, which are more vulnerable to degradation and loss than are paper documents.
“Given the rapid evolution of modern technology, government must ensure that its electronic records are not growing obsolete,” says Denham. She recommends the development of “a trusted digital repository [to] address long-term data preservation and provide a logging feature that clearly describes how a record has been accessed or manipulated.”
The archives should either be brought back into government and operated properly, or an arrangement should be worked out with the RBCM to ensure that the backlog of records is properly archived and that archiving is kept current. The longer the government waits to resolve the impasse, the more costly it will be to rectify and the more danger there is of valuable records being lost or degraded.
The records of the government’s business are public property and should be accessible to the public, not hidden away in a warehouse.
Ensuring government records are properly archived is not about the past, it’s about the future.
