The arson of medical records stored at Mtarfa is a new reminder that despite the enactment of national archives legislation, the state of our public archives is not a happy one.
The main depositories at Rabat and Mdina are in a reasonably good state, it is true, but even they are grossly understaffed, and were it not for the valuable assistance they are receiving from the Friends of the National Archives, the exploitation of their resources would have been much poorer so far. In any case, the National Archives and the ministry responsible for them cannot go on relying indefinitely on the Friends since the latter are a voluntary organisation at any one time.
What is much more shocking is the state of the Notarial Archives depository in Christopher Street, Valletta, a harrowing account of which has recently appeared in this newspaper. Some of the documents themselves are in a sorry state, and even the building itself is in places ruinous.
The current financial straits with which the public sector is bedevilled have, as usual, greatly affected the financial resources made available to the arts, libraries and archives. Complaints about the gross underfunding for the past few years of what has for long been Malta's best endowed library, that of the university, are becoming more frantic, while of course the National Library's miserable funding is chronic.
Hitherto, the National Archives have been administratively dependent on the public Libraries and Archives Department, so their lot is governed by what is happening in that department whose reputation for activity and innovation is not of the highest. Reports by experts in the past, with which the Friends of the National Archives are in agreement, recommended that the National Archives should become an autonomous department, and the sooner this is done, the better.
Autonomy alone, however, will not suffice. Much better funding will be needed to enable the National Archives to carry out the considerable task of seeing that large masses of documents now stored precariously in a number of buildings are brought in for sorting and calendaring. They have also to see that archives like the ones destroyed at Mtarfa, that have never been transferred by the Health Department to the National Archives, as they should have been under the National Archives Act, are so transferred.
More funds also need to be made available for the proper preservation of archives. Microfilming original documents can be an important back-up, but the recent incident in which microfilms of archives at the Cathedral Museum were destroyed through chemical reactions has shown that microfilming is not enough unless the microfilms are stored in a proper environment.
At the same time, the security of the buildings where unprocessed or untransferred archives are stored, needs to be strengthened. The government, and the nation at large, simply cannot tolerate a situation in which idle or malicious people have easy access to such depositories.
This is not the time for great capital expenditure, but it is surely time to plan for the large modern and well-equipped building that should house the National Archives within the next 10 years. The former Santo Spirito Hospital in Rabat is a handsome and reasonably useful building, but it cannot possibly cope with the masses of archives likely to be accessioned in the coming years.