Historians have of late been remarking how the digital age is dramatically innovating how we archive. This has implications for future archival use and research. They wonder how our national libraries are digitally adapting for tomorrow. Activities big and small and documents are increasingly being digitally preserved. Everything from books to news and official documents including in audio and video formats is being archived as digital objects. One can gauge the scale with the sheer number of web pages running into hundreds of billions being preserved just in the Internet Archive website. Add to these the daily tweets and other social media feeds, emails and blogs — all of which are part of the record we are leaving behind. One can see the point the historians are making with life increasingly being conducted on the web. 2020 can help put this in perspective. It is the year, as The New York Times put it, “The virus changed the way we internet”. It notes how our behaviours shifted, sometimes starkly, as social distance rules pushed us to our devices for work, play and connect with colleagues, friends and loved ones. We also witnessed how video taken with our phones and shared on social media played a role in sparking and documenting protests such as the Black Lives Matter movement across the world. Many families saw their children attend school online. All these events, including happenings since the internet went public in 1993, were digitally captured, thereby “telling the story of how our environment, culture and time period shaped us.” To know how life in the year 2020 was like, a future researcher — even a great-grandchild looking to understand the kind of person you were — will resort to the digital record we left behind. Some national libraries, particularly in Europe, have already been preserving minute by minute events and activities on the web relating to their countries. The British Library, for example, has since 2013 been collecting millions of web pages related to the United Kingdom every year for future use. 2013 is the year the UK national library was mandated with “legal deposit” to begin the comprehensive digital archival. Legal deposit is defined by the International Federation of Library Associations as a “statutory obligation [that] requires publishers, distributors and, in some countries, printers, to freely provide copies of their publications to the national collection.” This means that any publication in a country with legal deposit in its laws is obliged to be deposited at the national library for record-keeping and public use. Before the digital age, this meant publications in physical format – the physical books and other hard copies we still browse on library shelves. But with the advancement in technology, it has to be legislated to expand the scope to include digital resources and other forms of non-print media, whatever form they will take in the future. After that, the social media feeds, news websites, blogs and anything on the web touching on the country can be preserved as permanent historical record. Some countries in the continent such as South Africa and Namibia already have such provisions in their laws. But I am not sure to what extent countries in the East African Community have enlarged the scope of their national libraries’ legal deposit. The last time I checked not too long ago, some national libraries in the EAC have ebooks and catalogues accessible through the internet, others had little to speak of. However, one can find digital records in government websites in the region and across the continent. Many other records are scattered on the web by different local and international organisations and academic institutions archiving them according to their research or other interest in particular areas. The historians have a point urging the collection of these digital resources in one place such as a national library for research and posterity, and to secure national heritage. It is urgent countries yet to expand their legal deposit add provisions on digital and emerging media and allocate a budget to enable the archival.
