Listening to the Past, Speaking to the Future

1The Importance of ArchivesThe archival recordis … the direct,uninterpreted andauthentic voiceof the past.12 The history of the United Kingdom is the history of peopleand places, made up of great events that affect everyoneand small events that mould the lives of individualsand communities. Through books we see people, placesand events woven together, exploring and interpretingrelationships. Exhibits in museums and galleries givephysical insights into those events, those people,those places.The archival record is different. It is the direct,uninterpreted and authentic voice of the past: the primaryevidence of what people did and what they thought; thelook of places and events recorded through images –both still and moving; life’s beginnings and life’s endings;the growth and decline of industries and the ebbs andflows of communities and cultures. The archival recordis the foundation on which are built all our histories, withtheir many and varied voices. We may hear the voice ofthe Lord Protector of England and the voice of a Ranterside by side; or the voice of the captain of industry and theworker on the factory floor: the same event from verydifferent points of view.It is not overstating the importance of archives to suggestthat without their existence there would not be any realsense of history whether of the last ten years or the lastthousand years. Archives have always been the mainstayof traditional scholarship and represent the raw materialthat enables the scholar or researcher to analyse, compareand interpret.Archival records fulfil another unique role. They canbe the evidential components of the public record and aretherefore essential to understanding the processes ofdecision making and governance. Preserving andmanaging these records has a long and honourable historythat is now visible in the work of the UK’s national archivalservices and the network of local record offices, andspecialist archives. This role has become increasinglyimportant to public life as new responsibilities to all publicauthorities for the care of archives and current recordshave emerged. The Freedom of Information Act, theData Protection Act, the demands of electronic recordsmanagement and increasing media scrutiny of governmenthave brought fresh challenges. This importance has been