Abstract
The Value of Libraries and Archives in Preserving the Truth
The truth is under attack. In the 21st century, with vast amounts of information instantly available at the touch of a button, the preservation of knowledge has never been more important, but perhaps never more at risk. We have become used to instant access to all kinds of information, from scientific data to train timetables. But much of this information is hosted on platforms, and accessible via systems, which are owned and controlled by commercial organisations whose scale and power are unparalleled in history. Much of society’s communication now takes place on social media (with billions of messages and images being shared each day), and much of the income generated from online activity comes through targeted advertising on those platforms, not only creating great wealth for a small number, but giving them immense power to influence the behaviour of billions. The ability to target advertising comes from data profiling: tracking and harvesting each individual’s online behaviour and making assumptions about them (by players in an industry known as ‘adtech’), about not only their retail proclivities but also their social and political leanings. How do we know what information about us has been harvested by the adtech companies? How do we know what advertisements have been aimed at portions of society, and what the impact has been?
Libraries and archives have traditionally held the role of preserving knowledge for society. Whether the ideas contained in published books or journals, or the factual information gathered in census or tax records, this information has, for centuries, been made available for private research or public scrutiny because it has been preserved in a library or archive collection. Since the creation of settled societies in Mesopotamia, written records have been created and preserved, with the technologies used for creating and preserving knowledge changing over this 4,000 year-old history. Since the creation of the first publicly accessible libraries in the 17th century, and the broadening of access to them in the 19th (through legislation), society has come to depend on these ‘memory institutions’ for creating banks of reference points to ground factual evidence. The same has been true of archives of public and other records for a similar span. Libraries and archives have created invaluable ‘social infrastructure’, supporting education, transparency in government, and democratic institutions, as well as cultural identity for distinct communities, and even nations. The digital age has brought new challenges to these institutions and threatens their benefits to society. Public knowledge, in the form of digital data, has been effectively privatised by the major tech companies. Libraries and archives are making great strides in preserving some aspects of this new world of information, such as in the field of web archiving, but they face the considerable challenge of having to resource the preservation of the papyrus, parchment, and paper of thousands of years of written records of centuries of previous human knowledge-creation, as well as this new, even more costly task of archiving vast quantities of data. We now know that elections in many democratic countries in recent years have been influenced illegally by outside powers who have paid for political advertising to be targeted at segments of the voting population. With democracy itself at risk, we need libraries and archives to be funded and supported by legislation, and by their communities, or we risk facing George Orwell’s prediction in Nineteen-eighty four: ‘The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.’