A botched digitisation project has probably condemned irreplaceable documents to extinction following the fire in Parliament.
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. 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”.
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. In March 2017, it was reported that a seventh harddrive 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.
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.
How was this failure swept under the rug? Why was it not identified as fruitless and wasteful expenditure in Parliament’s annual reports? In the financial performance review of Parliament for 2016/17, the incomplete digitisation is not accounted for. Instead the R257,000 in wasted expenditure from the 2016 strike is rolled over.
How much more inability must still exist in this joke of a government?
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