Archives: Preserving Historical Records and Knowledge

Every government order, every land record, every freedom-struggle letter, and every reel of film tells a story about who we were and how we got here. But these records do not survive on their own. Paper crumbles, ink fades, and film reels catch fire. The institutions that step in to rescue, organise, and protect these materials for the long term are called archives. They are the quiet memory-keepers of a nation, ensuring that the evidence of our past remains available to scholars, citizens, and future generations. This post looks at what archival institutions do, how India’s major archives function, and how the digital age is reshaping the entire field.

The importance of archives in information preservation 🔗

An archive is a collection of records that have lasting historical, administrative, or legal value, along with the institution responsible for keeping them. Unlike a library, which mostly holds published books and journals that exist in many copies, an archive preserves unique, often unpublished materials such as official files, correspondence, manuscripts, maps, photographs, and audiovisual recordings. Once these original records are lost, they usually cannot be replaced.

Archival institutions perform a few core tasks. They appraise records to decide which ones carry permanent value, accession and organise them in a logical structure, and preserve them using scientific methods that slow down physical decay. They also provide reference services so researchers can actually use the holdings. The United Nations Archives describes the goal of preservation as keeping content authentic, accessible, and usable over time, regardless of media failure or technological change.

This work matters far beyond academic history. Archives support government accountability by holding records that document decisions and policies. They help settle legal questions about land, citizenship, and rights. They feed research in history, economics, and the sciences. And they anchor cultural identity by preserving the documentary heritage that a community recognises as its own.

The National Archives of India 🔗

The National Archives of India (NAI) is the central archival authority of the country and the custodian of the permanent records of the Government of India. It was established on 11 March 1891 at Calcutta as the Imperial Record Department, and after independence it was renamed and given a much broader national mandate. Today it is recognised as the largest archival repository in South Asia.

What the National Archives holds 🔗

The NAI’s collection is remarkably diverse. Its records are grouped into categories such as public records created by government departments, private papers of important individuals, oriental records, cartographic records (maps), and microfilms. The materials span several languages, including English, Hindi, Persian, Sanskrit, Urdu, and Arabic, and physical formats ranging from ordinary paper to palm leaf, birch bark, and parchment. Together these holdings form an invaluable source of information for scholars, administrators, and ordinary users.

How it manages and protects records 🔗

The functions of the NAI cover the full lifecycle of a record. According to an overview of its operations, the institution evaluates government records to decide what deserves permanent retention, applies scientific conservation methods like temperature control and fumigation to slow deterioration, and issues records-management guidelines to government departments so that record-keeping stays systematic across the administration. It also runs research and reference services and publishes catalogues and guides.

Importantly, the NAI does not work alone. It serves as the secretariat of the Indian Historical Records Commission, an all-India forum set up in 1919 that advises the government on the management of records and their use in historical research. The Director General of Archives is also responsible for implementing the Public Records Act, 1993, and the Public Records Rules, 1997, which govern how public records are managed and preserved across central ministries and departments. A Conservation Research Laboratory, established back in 1940, continues to research solutions for preserving fragile paper and ink.

Film and media archives 🔗

Not all records are written on paper. Cinema is one of the most powerful records of a society’s culture, language, and changing values, but film is also one of the most fragile media. Old celluloid film, especially nitrate-based stock, is highly flammable and decays quickly. Preserving moving images therefore needs a dedicated, specialised institution.

The National Film Archive of India 🔗

The National Film Archive of India (NFAI) was set up in 1964 as a media unit of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, with headquarters in Pune. Its three core objectives are to trace, acquire, and preserve the heritage of Indian cinema along with a representative collection of world cinema; to classify, document, and research films; and to act as a centre for spreading film culture. It has been a member of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) since 1969, which lets it exchange films and preservation expertise internationally.

The archive’s holdings go well beyond the films themselves. As documented in its collection profile, the NFAI preserves film and non-film material including celluloid prints, stills, glass slides, posters, lobby cards, scripts, and song booklets, with material dating back to the 1910s. This ancillary material captures the wider visual culture surrounding Indian cinema, not just what appeared on screen.

Why film preservation is urgent 🔗

The risks are not theoretical. In January 2003, a major fire in an NFAI vault in Pune destroyed irreplaceable nitrate-based films; official figures cited 607 films across more than 5,000 reels lost in that single incident. Disasters like this underline why proper storage, duplication, and digitisation are essential.

To address these dangers systematically, the government launched the National Film Heritage Mission (NFHM) in 2015. As described by the institution, this large project covers condition assessment of film reels, 2K and 4K digitisation and restoration of landmark films, construction of dedicated preservation vaults, and capacity-building workshops. Under this effort, the NFAI has been working to digitise and restore thousands of classics, with restored versions of films like Satyajit Ray’s works screened at international festivals such as Cannes and Venice.

Digital archiving and the future 🔗

The biggest shift in the archival world is the move from physical storage to digital management. Digitisation converts fragile originals into digital copies, which reduces handling of the delicate source material and lets people access records from anywhere. But digital archiving is much more than scanning. It is the ongoing, active management of digital objects so they remain accurate, authentic, and usable for future users.

India’s digital archive in action 🔗

India’s flagship example is Abhilekh Patal, the online portal of the National Archives of India, launched in March 2015. The name combines the Sanskrit words “Abhilekh” (records of ancient times) and “Patal” (a platform or surface), and “PATAL” also works as an acronym for Portal for Access To Archives and Learning. The portal lets users search, browse, and view digitised records online, dramatically reducing the need for in-person visits to the archives.

The scale of the digitisation effort is enormous. The NAI’s mission is to bring its entire collection of roughly 7 million records and around 300 million pages onto the portal over time. The collection includes extraordinary items such as the 7th-century Gilgit Manuscripts written on birch bark and historically significant letters connected to figures from the freedom struggle. Services like Page on Demand and Digitize on Demand let users request copies of specific records, and a mobile app extends access further.

The challenges ahead 🔗

Digital preservation solves some problems but creates new ones. Paper, if cared for, can last centuries; digital files face format obsolescence, where the software needed to open a file disappears, and media degradation, where storage devices fail. The average lifespan of digital storage media is often only 5 to 30 years, which means archives must continuously migrate data to new formats and devices to keep it readable.

To manage these risks, archivists rely on internationally agreed standards. The OAIS (Open Archival Information System) reference model and PREMIS (Preservation Metadata) standards, along with relevant ISO standards, provide a shared framework for keeping digital content authentic and interoperable over the long term. As Leslie Johnston of the U.S. National Archives has noted, digital preservation is essentially a series of risks paired with strategies to mitigate them, and the same challenges apply whether collections are born-digital or digitised from physical originals.

Looking forward, emerging technologies are reshaping the field. Artificial intelligence is being explored for tasks like predicting which materials need urgent preservation and automating description of large collections, while approaches such as cloud storage and distributed systems aim to make archives more resilient. The constant in all of this remains unchanged: the purpose of preserving records is to keep them available for the people, now and in the future, who will need them.

What do you think? If digital formats can become obsolete within a few decades, do you think future generations will find our digital records harder to access than the paper documents of a century ago? And which kinds of records from today’s India do you believe most deserve to be preserved for the next hundred years?

References

1. https://archives.un.org/en/content/digital-preservation
2. https://nationalarchives.nic.in/
3. https://www.gktoday.in/national-archives-of-india/
4. https://variety.com/2022/film/asia/national-film-archive-of-india-restoration-1235442639/
5. https://artsandculture.google.com/partner/national-film-archive-of-india
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Film_Archive_of_India
7. https://nfai.nfdcindia.com/introduction.php?rootId=VFZFOVBRPT0%3D&catId=VDBFOVBRPT0%3D&patId=VFZFOVBRPT0%3D&childId=VG1jOVBRPT0%3D
8. https://www.impriindia.com/insights/digitizing-memory-abhilekh-patal-2015/
9. https://nationalarchives.nic.in/en/online-portal-abhilekh-patal?language_content_entity=en
10. https://radiant-funds.com/article1.html
11. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3233/ISU-200090