Preventing loss of organizational memory

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Rusnah Johare
Alwi Mohd Yunus
1Rusnah Johare & Alwi Mohd Yunus

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THE LOST MEMORY :
LIBRARIES AND ARCHIVES DESTROYED IN THE
TWENTIETH AND TWENTY FIRST CENTURY
Rusnah Johare & Alwi Mohd Yunus

YEAR / LIBRARY CAUSES OF DAMAGE OR DESTRUCTION
1904 Italy,
Biblioteca
Nazionale
Universitaria di
Torino
• Fire started in the Library. Irreparable damage
was done to some of the most renowned
treasures.
1914 Belgium,
Library of the
Catholic
University of
Louvain
• Over 300,000 volumes, about 1,000 incunabula,
hundreds of manuscripts were all reduced to
ashes when German soldiers set fire to the library
on August 25 following German invasion of
Belgium at the beginning of the First World War.

1923 Japan • The Imperial University Library in Tokyo was
destroyed and most of its contents, amounting to
about 700,000 volumes, was lost. The Cabinet
Library lost 70,000 volumes.
1937-1945 China
National University
of Tsing Hua,
Peking
• Losses during the Sine-Japanese War
A great many private and public libraries were
destroyed. The most important losses were:
200,000 out of 350,000 volumes including the
card catalogue.

1937-1945 China
University Nan-k’ai,
T’ien-chin.
Institute of
Technology of He-
pei, T’ien-chin.
Medical College of
Hei-pei, Pao-ting.
Agriculture College
of Hei-pei, Pao-
ting.
National University
of Hu-nan.
University of
Nanking.
• More than 224,000 volumes were lost as a result
of bombing in July 1937.
• Completely destroyed by bombs.
• 10% of collections disappeared after 1939.
Probably transferred to Japan, together with the

1937-1945 China
Royal Asian Society,
Shang-hai
University of
Shang-hai
Soochow University
• Collections transferred to Tokyo after 1939.
• 27% of collections in Western languages
disappeared after 1939, as well as 40% of
collections of works in Chinese. Probably
transferred to Japan. Many other books damaged
by water.
• More than 30% of the most important books
disappeared during Japanese occupation 1937-
1939

1937 United States • Hundreds of libraries in Ohio, West Virginia,
Indiana, Illinois and Mississippi were destroyed by
floods.
1938 -1945
Czechlovakia
1939-1945
Germany
• Total losses of books, manuscripts and incunabula
were estimated at 2,000,000 volumes following
the German occupation and after the Munich
Conference of 1938 when Czechoslovakia was
robbed of a great section of territory. Thousands
of volumes were confiscated, burned, totally
destroyed or sent to Germany.
• The Second World War proved disastrous for
German libraries. Millions of books have been
lost, although many of the most precious works
have been preserved by storage elsewhere; it has
been estimated that a third of all German books
were destroyed.

1976 Cambodia • Following their rise to power, the Khmer Rouge
systematically began to destroy all vestiges of
„corrupt‟ culture. In the National Library of
Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge threw out and
burned most of the books and all bibliographical
records; less than 20% of the collection survived.
The total amount of damage is unknown, but
irreparable harm has been done to the country‟s
national heritage. The remaining material is
seriously threatened by bad storage conditions,
especially in the case of palm leaf manuscripts.
1978 United States
Stanford University
Library
1984 The Netherlands
Library of the Dutch-
South Africa
• Water main break caused major damage to 40,000
books plus 3,000 valuable items including
miniature books.
• In January, left-wing activists destroyed the uniquely
important library by throwing the books in the canals.

1986 United States • In April, a deliberately-set fire destroyed the
nation‟s third largest public library. In the worst
library fire in American history, nearly 400,000
volumes were completely destroyed and another
700,000 volumes were water-soaked.
1990 Kuwait
1993 Bosnia
National Library in
Sarajevo
1994 Great Britain
Norwich Central
Library
• Following the invasion by Iraqi troops, libraries
and computer centers were destroyed (as in the
case of the National Scientific and Technological
Information Center removed to Baghdad).
• 90% of the collection was destroyed as a result of
the civil war, with the loss of unique material for
the study of Bosnian culture.
• On 1st August, a fire destroyed over 350,000
books as well as irreplaceable historical
documents concerning the Norwich area. 12Rusnah Johare & Alwi Mohd Yunus

2003 Iraq
National Library
National Archives
National Museum
• Almost nothing remains of the library‟s, archive‟s
and museum‟s collections of millions of
manuscripts, unpublished archival materials,
books, and Iraqi newspapers.
(The Guardian, Tuesday April 15, 2003)

SECTORS 2000 - 2012
Business • 521,586,473 sensitive records were lost with a
mean of 462,809 records per incident
Education
Government
Medical
• 11, 286, 999 sensitive records with a mean of
22,756 records per incident
• 182,500,510 sensitive records with a mean of
410,113 records per incident
• 11, 182,713 sensitive records with a mean of
41,112 records per incident.
Source: http:datalossdb.org/index/most_discussed [Retreived 19 Jan 2013]

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 State Sued For Deleting E-Mails (Sacramento Bee, February 2003).
 The Securities and Exchange Commission fines five broker-dealers a
total of $8.25 million for failure to preserve e-mail communications.
 Andersen found guilty of obstruction of justice by shredding several
thousand documents and deleted thousands of e-mails relating to
the failed energy giant Enron. The firm is given the maximum penalty
under the law, is no longer in the auditing business, and has lost tens
of thousands of employees.

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PART OF THE ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY OF ARTHUR ANDERSEN
THE SCENE: Arthur Andersen's Houston
branch
Source: http://www.time.com/business/article/0,8599,263006,00.html
[Retrieved 11 Jan. 2010]

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PART OF THE ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY
Damaged Documents / Records

- US Census Bureau e-records
- Satellite observations of Brazil
- e-records of the former East
German government
- The first e-mail message
- 1986 Doomsday project in the UK
- The Canadian NDOC logs
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Source: KATIE HAFNER
Published: November 10,2004
Even Digital Memories Can Fade

 Carelessness
 Accidental fires
 Arson
 Natural disasters
 Shelling and air attacks
 Enemy-action
 Partisans and liberators
 Revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries
 Inherent instability of the materials

 Poor storage facilities
 Lack of training
 Lack of staff discipline
 Lack of interest from peers
 Lack of interest from administrators
 Lack of interest from top management and
policy makers
 Biological agents : mould, insects and
rodents.

EXPLICIT TACIT
• Document
• Records
• Recordkeeping systems
• Information systems
• Published information
• Organizations’ operations
• Work processes
• Support systems
• Products
• Services
• Written policies
• Written histories
• Databases
• People / staff
• Recorded tacit knowledge
• Knowledge from “the tricks of the
trade” / expertise
• Collective work habits
• Shared assumptions
• Way work is understood
• Ideas
• Decision making
• Experiences from the past
• Buried values
• Spirit
• Aspiration
• Core belief
• Mindsets
• Habit of thinking
• How to
• Embedded knowledge / skills
• Lessons over time
• Semantic understanding 21Rusnah Johare & Alwi Mohd Yunus

EXPLICIT TACIT
• Tacit feel
• Unconscious interpretations
• Axiomatic statements
• Past success
• Present success
• Past mistakes
• Present mistakes
• Wisdom

RECORDS & ARCHIVAL
TECHNIQUES
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT (KM)
TECHNIQUES
• Recordkeeping systems
• Preservation of recorded &
digital information:
- preventive
- restorative
- content preservation
• CoP
• Oral History
• Knowledge capture

 Storage facilities
 Environmental control
 Disaster control planning

Preservation and Restoration of paper document – tissue repair

Tissue Repair Encapsulation

Binding

Nnn
Restoration of film archives

Restoration of photographic archives

Equipment for restoration of film archives and digital archives

Equipment used for the restoration of paper-based records
National Archives of Korea

33
 Oral History is the systematic collection
of living people‟s testimony about their
own experiences.
 Oral History is not folklore, gossip,
hearsay, or rumor.
 Oral historians attempt to verify their
findings, analyze them, and place them
in an accurate historical context.
 Oral historians are also concerned with
storage of their findings for use by later
scholars.

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• Interviews need planning well in advance.
• Time is needed to ensure that the right
questions are formulated and asked.
• Formulating questions is best achieved by
interviewer who knows the subject
knowledge very well (an effective
interviewer is crucial).
• Questions must be analytical and
descriptive.
• Produce a transcript from an audio
recording and have it validated.
• Preserve the audio and video recording in a
trusted digital repository for organizational
or national memory.

Planning
Identify Your
Informant
Identify
Interviewer
Interviewer to
conduct research on
Informant
Interview sessions
Transcribing, O
rganize, packa
ge and share
Preservation of
recorded
interviews
Key Stages of
OH interviews

 In OH projects, an interviewee
recalls an event for an interviewer
who records the recollections and
creates a historical record.

Event
Interviewee
Interviewer
Verify, analyse, accurate
historical context
historical record

 OH depends upon human
memory and the spoken word.
 The means of collection can
vary from taking notes by hand
to elaborate electronic aural
and video recordings.

 The human life span puts
boundaries on the subject matter
that we collect with OH.
 We can only have one
lifetime, our limits move forward in
time with each generation.

Can we afford to
wait?

This leads to the Oral Historian’s
Anxiety Syndrome (Shopes, 2008), that
panicky realization that
irretrievable information is slipping
away from us with every moment.

Newspaper cutting of Merdeka

The importance of OH in the
context of records and archival
and corporate memory
perspectives.

 Folklore and experiences of
olden times face the grave
of rapid extinction.
 Disruption in the transmission
of our heritage to the
younger generation.
 Writing long letters, memoirs,
essays and keeping diaries
are things of the past.

 Attempts to re-write the history
of Malaysia, administrative
history, corporate memory and
legacies lies in the dearth of
original or primary sources.
 OH can help capture and
preserve the unrecorded and
generally unfamiliar memories of
the past and present as
evidences of history.

 OH can help capture and
preserve the unrecorded and
generally unfamiliar memories
and tacit knowledge of the
past and present as evidences
of history.

 OH can play an important role
in complementing and
supplementing the
documented evidences to
enhance the sources on our 21st
century legacies, corporate
memory and the memory of the
nation.

Thank You

Preventing loss of organizational memory

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