Blacklock’s Reporter, the famously ornery publication dedicated to holding Ottawa to account, recently ran a story with the headline “860M Documents Concealed”.
Nearly 900 million pages of historic records, the vast majority of the collection held by Library and Archives Canada, are inaccessible to the public, says an internal briefing note. Archivists blamed in part the fact that “boxes must be physically retrieved from storage.”
I came across this story when another outlet, Juno News, linked its story on Blacklock’s reporting on Twitter, adding a quote that “Seventy-eight percent of records, 860 million pages, are still inaccessible”.
Given that the outlet’s tagline is “Canada’s #1 independent news outlet on a mission to replace the CBC”, it’s pretty clear what their angle on the story is. However, I was fortunate enough to scroll down in the comments and find a genuinely helpful link someone had shared to a Region of Peel Archives blog post.
The piece, “Why don’t archivists digitize everything?”, goes through some of the challenges of digitizing content in physical archives. Beyond the sheer volume of material, its fragility, and its sometimes awkward dimensions, there is also the question of assembling and conveying enough context such that the record is actually meaningful to those viewing it.
In looking into this story, I also found this Blacklock’s Reporter story from a few years ago: “Fed Archives At Serious Risk”.