Dear reader,
A few years ago, I discovered a simple video online—an audio recording paired with a single photograph of a bird. The sound came from one of the most significant holdings in the British Library’s wildlife sounds archive: the last known voice of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō (Moho braccatus), a bird native to the Hawaiian archipelago. The recording, made in 1987 by ornithologist John L. Sincock, haunts me still. It captured a lone male calling out for a mate who would never answer—it was the final song of the species. Two years earlier, someone had spotted the bird for the last time. After that, only silence. Then it was declared extinct.
Today, the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō’s voice exists in digital preservation; a fact that embodies the essence of why humans archive: to capture what would otherwise be lost to time.
From the moment our ancestors pressed their painted hands on cave walls, humans have sought to leave traces of their existence. And the collection and preservation of human knowledge in a systematic way—what we now call archiving—has evolved from these primal markings into a sophisticated art form and science that shapes our collective cultural memory.
The earliest known archive was recorded in the city of Ebla, Syria, circa 2400 BCE, where archaeologists discovered more than 17,000 cuneiform tablets arranged in an orderly fashion. The archivists of Ebla, whose names are lost to time, created what we now recognise as a card catalogue system, complete with cross-referencing capabilities.
In Alexandria, the Great Library represented humanity’s first systematic attempt to gather all known knowledge under one roof. Founded circa 300 BCE, it held between 4,00,000 and 7,00,000 scrolls at its height. The library’s chief architect, Demetrius of Phalerum, established principles of organisation that would influence archival science for millennia.
As Europe descended into its Dark Ages, the Islamic world became the torchbearer of archival science. The House of Wisdom in Baghdad, established in the 8th century CE, introduced revolutionary cataloguing and archiving systems. Medieval monasteries in Europe, meanwhile, developed their own archival traditions. The scriptorium became not just a place of copying but of curation. The monk Alcuin of York, adviser to Charlemagne, standardised punctuation and spacing in texts, making them more accessible for future readers, an early form of what we now call metadata management.
Gutenberg’s invention of movable type in 1440 created an unprecedented challenge: information overflow. Venice, the publishing capital of Renaissance Europe, had produced 1,50,000 titles by 1500. This explosion of printed material necessitated new archival approaches. Swiss philologist Conrad Gessner’s Bibliotheca Universalis (1545) was the first attempt at a universal bibliography, listing 12,000 books in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.
The French Revolution marked another pivotal moment. When revolutionaries nationalised church and aristocratic collections, France suddenly needed to manage millions of documents. This led to the creation of the National Archives in 1794 and the development of the principle of respect des fonds—keeping records grouped by their origin—by Natalis de Wailly in 1841.
Digital technology has transformed archiving from physical to virtual. The Internet Archive, founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996, now contains 70 petabytes of data, including 330 billion web pages. But digital preservation brings its own challenges. The average lifespan of a webpage is 100 days—a phenomenon known as “link rot” or “content drift”, where web content becomes inaccessible over time—and format obsolescence threatens even carefully preserved digital content.
Today’s archivists, especially in the digital world, face formidable challenges. The world produces 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily. Social media platforms generate more content in a day than all libraries could store in a century. This data deluge forces us to ask: What deserves preservation?
When the Film Foundation estimated that 90 per cent of all American films made before 1929 were lost forever, Martin Scorsese, the foundation’s founder, called it “an extinction of memory on an industrial scale”. Similar losses plague early television; most live broadcasts from the 1940s and 1950s survive only in written descriptions. Scorsese’s institution attempts to find and restore some of that lost cinema. His is not a government body, but a private enterprise. In fact, over the years it is many private archives that have preserved crucial records that might otherwise have vanished.
The earliest private archives came from religious institutions and noble families. The Vatican Apostolic Archive, established in 1612, represents one such significant repository. Its shelves stretch 85 km and contain documents going back to the 8th century.
European noble families pioneered similar systematic archives, with the Medici Archive, begun in the 15th century, containing 4 million letters and documents, providing unprecedented insights into Renaissance life. Prussia’s state archivist Ernst Posner, in his seminal work Archives in the Ancient World (1972), wrote that such family archives often preserved crucial state documents as well.
The modern era brought with it corporate archives, such as those of the Dutch East India Company, which began in 1602 and kept meticulous records of maritime trade. Today, it spans 1.2 km of shelving and has earned the UNESCO Memory of the World designation. The Rothschild Archive, established in 1978, holds 2 million documents spanning 250 years of financial history.
Modern private archives continue their crucial role of historical preservation. The Rockefeller Archive Center, founded in 1974, holds 120 million pages of documents. IBM’s archive contains 3,00,000 artefacts from the company’s founding in 1911. Microsoft’s archive includes 1,00,000 items representing the personal computer revolution.
India’s formal archival tradition began with the National Archives of India, established in 1891 as the Imperial Record Department. It houses 40 million documents and 1,00,000 rare manuscripts and operates under the Ministry of Culture. But private archives like the Tata Central Archives (established 1991) in Pune preserve a century of industrial history in 70,000 files.
For a greater understanding of the enormous work such private archives do, read Janhavi Acharekar’s insightful essay that reminds us that the history of archiving reflects humanity’s evolving relationship with memory and knowledge.
As Jorge Luis Borges wrote in “The Library of Babel”, we risk creating an infinity of information where meaning drowns in abundance. The challenge before modern archivists then is not just preservation, it is curation, ensuring that future generations can find significance in our expanding cultural legacy.
When I revisited that recording of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō’s last song, I heard not just a lost species, but the very purpose of archiving: that even extinction cannot silence the voices that tell the story of the earth.
As always write back with your comments.
Wishing you a meaningful week ahead,
For Frontline,
Jinoy Jose P.
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