Malta's memory bank

Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, who is known for the many avant-garde proposals he advocated, had thought of having a world archive or otherwise an archive of the empire he was building.

A good archivist, Napoleon believed, was as important to the state as an artillery general.

But what is an archive? Charles J. Farrugia, head of the national archives, has compiled a book called L-Arkivji Ta' Malta, one of the latest trio in the PIN - Pubblikazzjoniet Indipendenza series forming the Kullana Kulturali encyclopaedia.

Archives are official documents that record the history of a nation be it economic, social, cultural or religious.

The development of humanistic concepts, Mr Farrugia writes in the book, led to the idea that the state would recognise public documents as a bequest to the nation and that the public would be able to access these documents.

An archive is not a collection. "Collections are housed in museums and libraries. Collections are independent of each other. The removal or the changing of a book from a library would not affect the operation of a library. In an archive, however, none of the documents can be substituted because each forms part of a chain," writes Mr Farrugia.

The book focuses on the development of archives, the archive section at the National Library in Valletta, the National Archives, the Public Archives, the Ecclesiastical Archives and the private archives, ending with a section on archived material in connection with Malta in foreign depositories.

Referring to the coming to Malta of the Knights of the Order of St John in 1530, the author notes that the knights brought with them not only archives connected with the Order but also professional practices in maintaining documents.

"As a nation, we were lucky that when the Knights of St John came here, they brought along with them documents that go back to 1107."

These documents remained in Malta after the departure of the Order in 1798 despite the fact that their retrieval was requested several times.

The other two books in the trio are by Michael Gatt and both deal with the geology and the palaeontology of the Maltese islands.

In his introduction, Mr Gatt notes the number of people are astounded while walking in the countryside to come across fossils of marine creatures embedded in the rock face.

The two books by Mr Gatt look in great detail at these marine remains and the science of palaeontology.

"While it is a pity that many people attempt to break these fossils loose, often merely to have as a souvenir, an ornament or an addition to a collection, few truly appreciate the unique significance of these remains, which is their scientific study," writes Mr Gatt.