The Windrush scandal reminds us of the value of archives

The Windrush scandal has highlighted a number of areas where the treatment of our fellow citizens has fallen seriously short of acceptable standards. It has also drawn attention to the importance of the preservation of, and continued access to, information.

The news that landing records for Commonwealth citizens arriving in the UK after the second world war had been destroyed by Home Office staff has rightly caused alarm. Who in the department knew what about this body of information? What discussions took place with the National Archives, which is responsible for managing and preserving the records of the UK government?

The records held important information that could make these people’s lives considerably less unpleasant. The simple act of preserving them — either in their original form, or as digitised surrogates — would have been seen as a sensible precautionary measure by the state on behalf of its citizens. Instead, their destruction indicates at best a failure of sound management inside the Home Office, and at worst a culture of callous disregard towards certain categories of Britons.

At the end of last week it emerged that records kept by another government department, the Board of Trade, had managed to find their way into the safe custody of the National Archives, where they could be located via an online catalogue and called up to the reading room in Kew by anyone. These records, it seems, can provide an alternative source of documentation for members of the Windrush generation struggling to prove that they are living in Britain legally.

What these two incidents show is that good management of information provides clear public benefits. Cost-cutting may be one possible explanation for what went wrong at the Home Office. Paper records take up space, and it costs money to retain staff who understand what information is contained in the records, how the data set is organised and the provenance of the information.

One has sympathy with an underfunded bureaucracy, but surely a conversation with the National Archives could have avoided the wholesale destruction of the landing slips? Libraries and archives exist to ensure, on society’s behalf, long-term access to information.

Today there is another big source of “public” information that is at risk of being lost. The data which are created every day by users of the large online platforms, such as Google and Facebook, are not the responsibility of any public body, and will only be retained by these companies if they see a commercial advantage in doing so.

Some public institutions around the world are trying to do something about this, however. The UK’s legal deposit libraries (together with the Library of Trinity College Dublin) are harvesting the UK web domain annually. They are co-funding a team of technical specialists at the British Library, with curators in the six legal deposit libraries selecting websites to be harvested. It is just as well the law was changed in recent years to allow this activity, given the centrality of the internet in circulating information and influencing public opinion.

The Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations 2013 do not, however, extend to the social media companies, or to “ad tech” data that are traded on a daily basis, making money from the way we behave online. The EU’s new General Data Protection Regulation is one way in which European countries are seeking to regulate the use that can be made of such data. But in order to understand how online behaviour is being manipulated, we need a concerted effort to preserve samples of it in public institutions.

The US Library of Congress had been making strides in this direction with an important agreement with Twitter, but this has now sadly come to an end. Such efforts are very costly, and libraries and archives around the world are struggling to find sufficient funding to face the challenges of the ubiquity of digital information, while continuing to preserve and give access to the paper records of the past.

The destruction of information has often been a political act. You do not have to go very far back to see this: the National Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina was targeted by Serbian shells in 1992, as an attempt to enforce the loss of national memory and culture. Decisions taken by the UK government about the preservation of information must also be seen as political.

The destruction of records, not to mention the levels of public funding for libraries and archives, is a political act with grave implications — for individual citizens and for society as a whole.

The writer is Bodley’s Librarian at the University of Oxford