- Valuable records in Parliament's library are likely to have been damaged or destroyed in the fire earlier this month.
- About five years ago, a project was supposed to create a digital store of Parliament's archive.
- Quality-control samples suggest there
- Valuable records in Parliament's library are likely to have been damaged or destroyed in the fire earlier this month.
- About five years ago, a project was supposed to create a digital store of Parliament's archive.
- Quality-control samples suggest there are troubling questions about how the project was managed, especially by Parliament itself.
A botched digitisation project has probably condemned irreplaceable documents to extinction following the fire in Parliament.
Over the course of two years, an outside company was paid millions of rands to scan Parliament's collection of about 7 000 volumes of material or seven million individual pages.
Much of this collection was unique to Parliament — no other store of archival material in the country has a copy. Of particular importance are the annexures to the Hansard — the official record of Parliament's deliberations going back to 1910. The records include unpublished government reports, annual reports, research and manuscripts.
Parliament staff cannot yet access the buildings where these records are kept. While the library and stores at the National Council of Provinces are understood to be safe, a 4 January report to the Parliament Library warns that the entire collection in the stores at the National Assembly were affected by the fire, and may be lost. These stores contain South Africa's entire pre-1994 parliamentary records.
The basement in the National Assembly that houses the archives is believed to have suffered grave water damage during the fire. At one point the water was chest-high, according to a report. This would be disastrous for the documents housed there, most of which are decades old.
The 4 January report offers some mitigation: these records have been digitised. But this is not accurate.
Almost half of the scans are semi-legible or even completely unreadable. This failure was identified by Parliament's library staff after the records were scanned in 2017. The service provider returned to Parliament to rescan the botched records - but abruptly stopped this work long before it was completed.
Despite that millions of pages needed to be scanned again in order to be legible, the project was listed as being finished in official records.
READ | Early indications are that valuable historical artefacts survived Parliament fire
In Parliament's Annual Report for 2017/18, listed among the key achievements that year was the digitisation of "approximately seven million pages of rare and fragile library material which included books, Hansard, artwork, microfiche, photographs and maps".
The annual report was presented to the Joint Standing Committee on Financial Management of Parliament (Joint Committee) on 31 October 2018 by Acting Secretary to Parliament, Baby Tyawa.
The legacy report of the fifth term of Parliament repeats this claim, saying that the Enhanced Library Service Project had digitised this huge archive and that the project had been completed in 2017.
But the monthly reports filed in 2017 by the Rare & Historical Information Services (RHIS), the division of the Parliamentary Information Centre that deals specifically with the huge archives at Parliament, show a different picture.
In January 2017, the librarian in charge of RHIS at the time, Ingrid Henrici, reported that 6 092 volumes had been scanned by that stage, or 88% of the total archive. This was being performed by a service provider called i-Kno, at just under R5 million, according to Parliament's spokesperson.
But the quality control that was done on the project suggested that the project was far from complete. Of the 1 746 scanned volumes that had been checked by the RHIS library staff, 44% had to be rejected. The Annexures to the Hansard and manuscripts were a particular problem. Three staff members had been assigned to the project.
At this stage, according to the delivery schedule in the report, the digitisation project was already two months overdue.
In the next report for February 2017, the situation is worse.
Quality checks revealed more deficient scans, with the error rate rising to just under 50%. Of the 2 014 scanned volumes that had been checked, 1 001 had to be rejected and redone.
In March 2017, it was reported that a seventh hard drive used to store the digitised records had crashed, "a very concerning issue", wrote Henrici.
More worrying was that the quality control of the scans was "suspended until delivery of re-scanned volumes takes place". The report states that the service providers had made no further deliveries of scanned materials, nor had they rescanned any new items.
The April report does not mention the digitisation project, and in June the only mention is a note that quality checks on the scans were "continuing slowly".
In July, a farce: An attempt was made by i-Kno to access Parliament to complete the outstanding rescans and pack up the equipment and remove it from Parliament. This was unsuccessful due to their vetting having expired and their problem in getting revetted due to outstanding tax documents.
In its last available report, from September 2017, RHIS gives up:
These reports were sent to Albert Ntunja, the Chief Librarian of the South African Parliamentary Library at the time. From here, Ntunja should have reported on the progress of this project to the Divisional Manager of Knowledge and Information Services. In 2016, Neil Nel retired from this role, and his position was taken over by Dr Leon Gabriel.
In turn, Nel and Gabriel should have reported to the Deputy Secretary to Parliament: Core Business, who should