By Clement Charles, CEO & Founder, AllTheContent News Agency
In these early days of the 21st century, overflowing with promises for the future, knowing and preserving the past are imperative for all human communities, especially for local and public authorities endowed with the means and ambitions for such projects.
Though France is a country fortunate to boast a rich history and ample archives, a surprising number of local authorities have never taken their own history into their hands, leaving it up to regional or national historians to share (or ignore) their past.
A majority of local authorities have therefore never initiated historical or scientific research about their regional history or the most notable stages of its development. Undertaken by historians, this work is nonetheless important for both present and future generations, as well as for the academic community.
Alongside a “noble” history, the 20th century also generated thousands of audiovisual documents, photographs, slides, super8 films and videotapes.
In some cases, private, association, or public funds have been established, which has the advantage of gathering content securely, but lacks in human and technical resources to manage them. Elsewhere, nothing has been set up, resulting in material scattered at the bottom of drawers, lost in family basements or municipal archive boxes.
Constituting archives prevents data from being lost forever, but requires complex, ongoing effort. Once the archives have been launched, a long process of gathering content from citizens and institutions begins, before archiving, digitizing and indexing the material can truly begin, which involves regularly updating the entire archives in keeping with the latest storage and digitizing standards. The creation of associations makes it possible for supervised volunteers to manage the archives directly, while keeping necessary resources to a minimum.
As everything accelerates, including the loss of data from the recent past, it is essential to implement an ambitious conservation policy for all documents, as well as a means of sharing these unique testimonies to a partially forgotten past.
Tomorrow is being prepared today. It is therefore today that we must give ourselves the means of projecting our history into the future, be it local or public.