National Archives building, the future

Thursday, 31 March, 2016

The Department of Arts and Culture has given the go-ahead for the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa to embark on a capital works project to ensure the continued preservation of South Africa’s irreplaceable documentary heritage. The current National Archives building is starting to show its age and although a few upgrades have been done since opening its doors in 1988 it was felt that a major facelift is needed this time around. The work started in January 2013 and is set for completion during this financial year.

The project include:
  1. The re-design of the front entrance of the building and the security control room, which will provide a more friendly face to the public while at the same time provide enough space for security services to install the devices they need to safeguard the contents of the building;
  2. Connected to this, all the security systems throughout the building will be replaced with state of the art 21st century technology, including CCTV cameras and biometric identification of persons;
  3. Fire is always a huge risk, especially where we are talking about more than 66 kilometres of paper achival records and therefore the entire fire detection and suppression systems in the building will be replaced;
  4. Another enemy of archival records are temperature fluctuations and humidity issues. The entire air-conditioning and ventilation systems in the building will be replaced to ensure that all our archival records are kept at the right temperature and the right humidity;
  5. The National Archives building was fitted out with static shelves when it was first occupied with the result that space to keep archival records became a problem from the early 1990’s onwards. As part of this capital works project all static shelves will be replaced with mobile shelves. The result will be that up to 20% more space will be created in each strongroom which would give us the ability to accept the transfer of archival records from our client offices again. This, in its turn, would alleviate the space problems at our client offices.
 
Renovating a building while at the same time ensuring that essential services continue is daunting, but the staff is striving to balance the need to ensure the safety of the archival records with the need of the public to have access to these records. One example is that some archival records had to be removed to temporary strongrooms, or Modular Archive Facilities, on the premises as the strongrooms in the building cannot be renovated with the archival records inside them. Although the temporary strongrooms would meet all international standards re air-conditioning, fire detection and suppression, security, etc. there will be a negative influence on our service delivery. Another example of negative service delivery is that archival records which are in the process of being moved cannot be made available to researchers. 
 
Almost all the project targets have been met, except for the renovation of the strongrooms which still has a way to go. The completion date for the project is set for early 2017.
 
Published date: 
Thursday, 31 March, 2016
Group Header: 
Archives Week
Type of News: 
Friends of the Archives