Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office with responsibility for Culture, Senator Dr Shantal Munro-Knight, is assuring Barbadians that the Department of Archives is working swiftly to put steps in place to recover any available documents from the recent fire and increase the pace of digitisation to prevent future losses.
Senator Munro-Knight gave this assurance yesterday, Tuesday, June 18, hours after a fire destroyed Block D and a substantial number of historical records contained therein at the Black Rock, St Michael institution.
Speaking to the Barbados Government Information Service (BGIS) ahead of a meeting with key government officials, Dr Munro-Knight assured that the team would determine the way forward for the Department, which include securing the existing building and any materials that could be retrieved and identifying mitigation strategies to prevent a recurrence.
The Minister revealed that Block D stored documents such as historical court proceedings, the Court of Chancery Records, newspaper, official gazettes, vestry records, among others. However, Dr Munro-Knight stressed that the main building, where locals and visitors would come to do their research, had not been affected.
Munro-Knight disclosed:
“We were in the process of working with the Fire Service and we have gone as far as to have an engineering firm that was doing an assessment of the Archives to mitigate against an unforeseen circumstance like this.”
She further disclosed:
“Unfortunately, we’ve had the occurrence, and as I said, the plan was to begin to migrate the records and then the intent is, by this November, to break ground for a new archives building. As part of the construction process, we would look at all the things in terms of hurricane resistance, fire suppression and all of those things. All of those plans are in train.”
“So, it’s a bit unfortunate that we’ve had this circumstance, but we are seeing now how we can move forward as much as possible. As soon as the fire officials give the all clear, the team would then be moving in to see if there’s any material, for instance, anything that was stored in cabinets that can also be retrieved,” she added.
The Minister pointed out that the fire, though a setback to the Department would not delay Government’s plan to digitise the records and build out an archival economy.
She shared that two weeks ago, a number of bound records had been moved to Building No 2 as part of the Department’s continuing digitisation process and the team was able to salvage some of the documents from the fire, thanks to the quick actions of the Barbados Fire Service.
“We had started to digitise the records, so it is about how quickly now we can move the records out and continue with that process. So, it is a blow, in the sense that we’ve lost some very important records, but we will evaluate and move forward.”
“I think it just gives us a greater impetus now to really push ahead with the plans for how we protect our records…We started with the Transatlantic Slave records, some of which as I said before were already digitised and in the process of being digitised and that allows us then to go ahead even as we assess what has been lost.”
Senator Munro-Knight thanked Barbadians for the outpouring of support, adding that “all is not lost”.
(GIS).
