A country’s national archives are often described as “the nation’s memory house.”
They contain the records of government decisions, actions, leaders and crises, along with other collections deemed of national importance.
But the memory houses of both Canada and the United States are in trouble, battered by political and financial headwinds.
In Canada, Dr. Leslie Weir has felt those headwinds. She has served as Librarian and Archivist of Canada since 2019, through several rounds of budget cuts. In the U.S., Dr. Colleen Shogan has also come up against pressures to her country’s archives. She served as the 11th Archivist from 2023 until she was abruptly removed by the Donald Trump administration earlier this year. Today Shogan is a senior adviser for More Perfect, a bipartisan Washington-based organization dedicated to strengthening American democracy.
Here, historian Charlotte Gray talks to Shogan and Weir about the role of the archives, the threat and opportunity the digital era presents, and why selfies are important.
Charlotte GrayMichelle Valberg/Supplied
Charlotte Gray: Why should we care about the national archives – the records of a country’s government?
Colleen Shogan: I think there are two reasons. The first is for the broad study of history. You cannot tell an accurate history of a country without a [written] account of what government has decided and why.
The second reason is that national archives provide accountability in a democracy. The records enable the people who are governed to hold their elected representatives accountable for their decisions.
Leslie Weir: I would add that the records don’t just preserve the debates and the decisions. You also have to be able to understand the influencers and how the decisions were made.
When you’re looking at a decision made by the Supreme Court of Canada in, say, 1932, if you look at that decision only in the context of today, instead of the legal framework they were working within back then, it is hard to understand the reasoning for the decision and what the dissenting views might be.
CG: What is the relationship between the archival records and the writing of history?
LW: We have massive records. The majority are analog, and they’re not easily accessible. The key thing with historians is that they can go back into the records and gather different sources and they’re doing additional research so that they can delve into events or incidents that may have been forgotten. Then they can analyze what they’ve found because they know how to interpret information and ask critical questions.
CS: The archivists preserve and provide access to the records, and the historians interpret the records.
But it is important to know that, in NARA [the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration], there are 13 and a half billion pages of records but that only represents about 3 per cent of all federal records created. We rely upon the archivists to decide what should be in the permanent record. So the archivists themselves are actively creating history by applying their professional training to ensure they are building the most complete record possible before historians get there.
"You’re basically building a new Spotify – that’s the amount of data." — Colleen Shogan
In the U.S., we have record schedules that determine what records are going to be retained either permanently or temporarily. The proposed schedules for government records are posted publicly. If citizens say, “Hey, you’re only making this group of records temporary, and we really think they should be permanent,” the schedule would be reviewed and the case would make its way to the national archivist.
For presidential records, there is no access from years zero to five after the end of an administration, limited access from years five to 12, and then after year 12, the records are largely open. But former presidents have a lot of discretion to provide restrictions on some records.
CG: Leslie, does Canada have an equivalent of that process?
LW: NARA practices are aligned with the practices used in the U.K., Australia or New Zealand. These countries have schedules where government records are regularly declassified and government agencies must make the case if they consider that a document remain classified.
Our system is different. Individual departments have to declassify documents, rather than LAC [Library and Archives Canada]. We don’t have defined periods for disposition, or schedules for when records will be opened to researchers; documents remain closed by default.
There is a group that tries to identify records that can be disclosed but the majority of our processes are triggered by a request from a researcher.
CG: So there is currently no legal obligation on LAC to release government papers?
LW: There is no legal obligation, but there’s a legal opportunity.
Librarian and Archivist of Canada Leslie Weir at Library and Archives Canada February 13, 2020 in Ottawa.Dave Chan/The Globe and Mail
CG: I’m hearing all the time from historians that it can take years for a request to be fulfilled, and that LAC is much slower to provide access than other national archives. For example, the papers of Kim Campbell [prime minister of Canada, June to November, 1993] remain closed, whereas the papers of Bill Clinton [president of the United States, 1993-2001] and Tony Blair [prime minister of the United Kingdom, 1997-2007] are already mostly open.
Would it make your life easier if, for government records, we returned to the system that was in place until 1983? That was the year that the access to information law came into effect. Before that, there was a 30-year rule: the National Archives [as LAC was then constituted] opened all records to researchers unless they were deemed classified. There was a big shift in 1983 because the new access to information law dropped the 30-year rule. It stated that individual departments would decide whether a record was no longer active and could be transferred to the National Archives. Suddenly it became much more difficult for researchers to see government records.
LW: The Access to Information Act is currently being reviewed, and under the previous government there was a Treasury Board “policy guidance” advisory to promote access to Canada’s history by outlining time frames for government institutions to release records. But so far, no amendments to the Access to Information Act have been made.
CG: There are huge financial pressures on the national archives in both Canada and the U.S. In Canada, LAC’s budget cuts have led to 90 archival positions disappearing and programs being cut. It is now looking at a further 15-per-cent reduction from the Carney government. In addition, LAC is about to open a large new facility in Ottawa with extensive public programming. What is the impact of this, Leslie?
LW: We are simply not resourced to actively go through all our historical collections and say, “Today’s the day we should be releasing [for example] prime minister Kim Campbell’s papers.” On top of that, the growth of prime ministers’ papers since her day is exponential. Prime minister [Stephen] Harper’s records equal all the records of every prime minister to that date added together.
"Beyond the issue of what government archives are available to historians is the question of what history a national museum, a scholar or a government chooses to tell." — Charlotte Gray
CG: Colleen, NARA’s budget has been squeezed steadily over the past few years. It is now facing a US$60-million cut this year, which is 12 per cent of its budget. What will this mean?
CS: The U.S. National Archives won’t cut the collection, but they’ll have to condense them. NARA has 40 facilities and the rationale was to keep the records close to the people that created them. So the facility in California holds all the state’s immigration records and port records. Is NARA going to be able to keep all 40 open? I doubt it.
But the thing that really keeps me up at night, and I’m sure worries Leslie, too, is that when I spoke about NARA’s 13 and a half billion records, I was just talking about pieces of paper. There are now billions of electronic records being born, and that will soon translate in the United States to trillions of digital federal records that will arrive at NARA in the next five to 10 years.
Right now, the National Archives has no system to handle that volume of digital records. There is no digital space for archivists to work with those records, and no mechanism or application that can share them with Americans who want to access those records.
When I was there, we estimated that it would cost at least $100-million to build the system. You’re basically building a new Spotify – that’s the amount of data. And you can build it piece by piece. That was my plan: Ask for $10-million roughly every year in order to build various components over a decade. But if you’re cutting the budget, you’re not going in the right direction.
LW: We do have a digital asset management system. We’re good on ingest of records and being able to safely store and preserve them. But there are lots of technical complexities about developing a database that’s in proprietary software. We used to have regional facilities in every region of Canada, but those were closed back in the 2000s.
CG: Beyond the issue of what government archives are available to historians is the question of what history a national museum, a scholar or a government chooses to tell. On both sides of the border, we’ve watched the pendulum swing on how each country deals with the darker periods and issues in its past. In the U.S., there is a new focus on the history of slavery in recent years. In Canada, the history of Indigenous peoples has been in the spotlight. How do national archives ensure that they stand above the ebb and flow of these debates, unswayed by politics or ideology, and do not lose records that are no longer seen as important or are regarded as unacceptable by current cultural standards?
Dr. Colleen Shogan is sworn-in to be 11th Archivist of the United States, at the National Archives Museum in Washington, DC, on September 11, 2023.MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
CS: Since NARA was created in 1934, the office of Archivist of the United States has been an independent non-political appointment, based on a candidate’s professional qualifications as an archivist. The job is not given to someone who is beholden to one president or one party, and the archivist is obliged to follow the laws about the preservation of records. However, the statute governing the National Archives also states explicitly that the president can dismiss or remove the archivist. If the president removes the archivist, the statute states there has to be a notification to Congress with an explanation for why this has occurred.
CG: But you were removed earlier this year, and so far, no official explanation has been produced for you or Congress. There has been speculation that this was because the President is upset that he was prosecuted for removing some of the papers from his first presidential term to Mar-a-Lago, rather than sending them to NARA as required by law – although this occurred before you were appointed archivist. Now Marco Rubio, Mr. Trump’s Secretary of State, who has no archival training, is the acting head of NARA.
CS: So the whole structure, as defined in the NARA statute, has proven a house of cards.
"Let’s be clear where Ancestry.ca gets its records. They get them from LAC, NARA and other sources, and they still have only a tiny, tiny fraction of the records we have." — Leslie Weir
CG: Leslie, I don’t think there is any suspicion of partisan interference in the way that Canadian records are triaged for the permanent collection. However, there are other concerns that have surfaced recently.
LW: Archivists in both our institutions [the Canadian and American] adhere to methodologies that are recognized globally, but over time, people are looking for different things. As an example, there are periods when the National Parole Board have sent us all the parole requests submitted to the board, others where they have sent a sampling of them, and then there’s a period when they only submitted the decisions made. In Canada, Indigenous people and people of colour tend not to get paroled, whereas people from certain backgrounds are more likely to be paroled. If you have only the decisions, you can do a statistical analysis, but if you actually have the records of individual cases a historian can dig into the inconsistencies in the way people are treated.
CG: Will AI make the jobs of archivists easier?
LW: I think AI will create tools that will help archivists better handle the volume and complexity of the billion records for which we are custodians and want to make accessible. It will be great when we can train models that can actually create metadata, or help create algorithms, or support large language models so that we can help users navigate through archives. But recent testing has shown that AI is not there yet in terms of being trustworthy, or creating metadata.
CS: It is already taking existing analog records that have been digitized and transcribing the handwriting, which makes these records searchable, which is incredibly important. [Both the U.S. and Canada] have already done that for census records. In future, AI will be used to share records because people will become used to having a conversation with a search mechanism to find the records they are looking for.
And you’re not getting rid of the analog records. You still have to digitize them, and that’s also a labour-intensive process.
CG: How do you build public support for a decent budget especially when we risk historical amnesia because so little history is taught in schools or captured in our media? Many users in both countries think that we no longer need expensive physical buildings and records, when there is so much online and people can just sign up to Ancestry.ca or other easily accessible websites for family histories.
LW: Let’s be clear where Ancestry.ca gets its records. They get them from LAC, NARA and other sources, and they still have only a tiny, tiny fraction of the records we have.
Our new Ottawa facility, Adisoke, should really generate support for archives because I think it will connect people to our history and our stories. We haven’t done a good job in this country on our founding documents, as NARA has by displaying the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution in the marble rotunda of its Washington building, or mounting exhibitions of our prime ministers, as NARA has done with U.S. presidents. Now we will have a showcase.
CS: When I was National Archivist, I insisted that visitors should be allowed to take selfies in the rotunda and share them on Instagram. I used to love seeing tourists running around with their phones, taking videos next to the U.S. Constitution.
LW: I’ve got picture of myself next to the U.S. Constitution. Thank you, Colleen! And you’ll certainly be able to take selfies in Adisoke with the founding documents that will be on display.
We’re also looking at having a totally different kind of family history and genealogy interaction, somewhere that a casual visitor can find out facts like who won the Stanley Cup the year they were born. When people see a personal connection to the past, often they want to know more. People can go in looking for something personal, but they’ll discover more about the history of our country that I hope will inspire and get that spark going.
This interview has been edited and condensed.