Sri Lanka’s National Archives in its spacious setting on Racecourse Avenue is a busy place with thousands of students, researchers and members of the public visiting it daily while many others write to the department seeking information. The documents they seek are somewhere in the seven- storey building – and the staff are kept busy helping with each request.

Converting the entire Archives into formats that can be stored and accessed digitally represents a mammoth undertaking, explains Dr. Saroja Wetthasinghe, Director of the National Archives.

Complete digitisation is necessary, when one considers that despite the great care taken to preserve them, many documents continue to deteriorate slowly but steadily. Among these are countless records from the Portuguese Dutch and British periods, copies of council meetings, Sannas, Grain Tax Registers and Nila Pangu & Praveni Pangu Registers, some a few centuries old. Much of the stored records are from after 1948, when Ceylon gained Independence.

Every day brings new additions to the Archives. Currently, three ordinances - the Printing Presses Ordinance, the Printers and Publishers Ordinance and the Newspaper Ordinance – require documents falling under these categories to be submitted to the Archives. Depending upon their nature, government documents are also given to the Archives, but only after they are entirely inactive – which takes anything from 25 to one hundred years.

When such documents arrive, the staff’s immediate concern is preservation. Removing acid from the paper is one of their first tasks in a long line that ends only at careful storage in controlled conditions. They have to face conditions of temperature and humidity, organisms like fungi and insects, and last mishandling or improper storage.

Describing the process as “costly, laborious and time consuming,” Dr. Wetthasinghe reveals that projects are now underway to create a database with an index of the entire archive. When this is completed, she hopes to make it available on the web. Currently, the department’s website (http://www.archives.gov.lk/) has only basic information about the Archives, and its operating procedures. In another project - Towards A New Age of Partnership 2 (TANAP 2) between the respective National Archives of Sri Lanka and the Netherlands. Dutch records are being converted to microfilm. The Archives have also begun digitising land records.

But the process is going to take a long time, says Dr. Wetthasinghe, explaining that only a small team is assigned to work on the digitising and indexing projects.

History within history

The Archives as we know it now was instituted in 1973, by the National Archives Act No.48. But it was during the monarchial period (3rd B.C to 1815 A.D), that officers were first placed in charge of the Royal Archives, says Dr. Wetthasinghe.

Hay MacDowal’s 19th century account reveals the existence of an officer ‘Maha Mohotti’ - a man responsible for the maintenance of the Kandyan palace archives in the 18th and 19th centuries.
However, it was with the arrival of the Dutch (1640 to 1796 A.D) that systematic updating and maintenance of the Archives began, says Dr. Wetthasinghe.

The post of Archivist itself was created only in 1901 and the Archives which functioned as a part of the Colonial/ Chief Secretary’s office during the British period was established as the Department of the Government Archivist in1947.

Finally, with independence, the department was re-named the Department of National Archives.