By Laura Bernier Ebell
If you reach into your pocket or your purse right now, chances are you will find a crumpled-up receipt from a recent trip to the shop.
If you leave your receipt on a windowsill for the next week or two, you will notice that you will no longer be able to read the price of your lunch. The chemical process of heat transfer that allows for the “printing” on specially coated paper also causes the text to fade over time, especially in certain conditions of high heat or light.
That small slip of paper which shows what you paid for your sandwich and drink across the street may not be a significant record for the history books, but it was this exact same technology that enabled vital communication in the mid-1990’s to reach across continents.
At UNHCR, fax paper transmissions quickly communicated key information in dynamic and changing emergency situations, much like email does today. It was a medium not meant to last long term, but one born of rapid convenience. For archivists, this presents a unique problem nearly 30 years post creation: How do we save the information within a disappearing medium?
From 1991 to 1995, UNHCR was the leading humanitarian organization working throughout the Former Yugoslavia during the Balkans Wars. Operating in over 20 offices with thousands of colleagues throughout the region and at Headquarters, faxes communicated messages in real time to fellow staff members, international and national organizations, and the major actors throughout the crisis. These documents range from dramatic situation reports to logistics and mission planning – and everything in between.
Our collection of the Records of the Former Yugoslavia (Fonds 31) measures over 1km of linear shelving space and is an astonishingly comprehensive record of the crisis from deep within the conflict zone. A press release statement from early 1996 estimated that from 1991 UNHCR gave “more than 1.1 million tons of humanitarian assistance to more than 3.5 million people.” Massive coordination efforts to enable delivery of this aid, such as the four-year long Sarajevo airlift operation (1992-6), would not have been possible without fast technology to aid communication.
In 2015, a major legacy project began in the Records and Archives Section to document, declassify, and preserve the records created by UNHCR staff during the crisis. Our internal estimation of the fax paper contained in this collection is around 20%, or 300,000 pages – all of which will be lost to time without intervention.
Limitations are also opportunities for resourcefulness, and luckily, we have technologies that help us creatively find solutions. By utilizing advanced scanning equipment, we can save critical information by creating 1:1 preservation paper copies of the fading fax pages. The level of fading varies greatly depending on several factors, including whether the original records were exposed to light or heat where they were stored before being transferred to the archives. In some cases, it is already too late for intervention, but in others the results are truly magical.
We have been able to save an essential piece of UNHCR’s history through our preservation efforts. Today, approximately 2,000 archival boxes have been fully treated for fax paper rectification. However, due to the magnitude and complexity of the task, the project is still ongoing .
Have you connected the modern-day fax counterpart of emails as a “fading” medium? Our Digital Preservation Team works incredibly hard to preserve UNHCR’s communication history with a dedicated Digital Preservation System as well as a web and social media archive, to ensure that the record of our work will not be forgotten over time.
Preservation is not only for paper records; it is often more urgent and pressing for digital media to be saved due to rapid changes in technology. Although the documents that you produce every day are all at risk, there is still time, and opportunities, to preserve your records through following or implementing a preservation plan.
Check here for resources on digital preservation.