Archives in times of war and algorithms: who will guard the memory?

BarcelonaIn the future, will we let AI decide what we remember? How do Palestine, Ukraine, or the Sahrawi people protect their archives and their history? How can archives represent everyone and not just the elites? Which archives have been created to confront oppression? What are the dangers of digital memory being in private hands? Can AI change the consumption of historical information?

More than 2,000 professionals from 110 countries will try to answer all these questions and many more. They will meet from October 27 to 30 in Barcelona, ​​​​at the International Congress of Archivists, the most important global meeting in the field of archivists. archives and document management. "We know pasts, creating futures" is the title ofa conference that aims to reflect on the role of archives in a changing world.

"When the Serbs entered Sarajevo, the first thing they did was control the airport, the power plant, and the access roads, and burn the archives. Burning heritage not only means leaving a people without memory, but also without documents that attest to their rights," explains Alan Capellades, one of the speakers at the conference and from Catalonia. In August 1992, the Serbs not only burned down the Sarajevo Library, which housed all the documentary heritage, but also the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo, which housed one of the most important collections of Islamic, Jewish, and Ottoman manuscripts in Europe.

During the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Israelis destroyed the Palestinian Research Center, created in 1965 to collect photographs, films, and documents on the country's history. It was not the first time they had attempted to take away this archive of Palestinian collective memory. In the 1970s, they sent a letter bomb and detonated a car in front of the building. With Israel's genocide in Gaza, almost all the elements that shape and inform Palestinian collective and private memory have been destroyed. An estimated 104 sites, cultural institutions, museums, and archives have been destroyed. Among them, the Gaza Archives, with 150 years of documents, and the Omari Mosque and its entire library.

The Palestinian Counter-Archive

"The destruction of heritage "It is part of a systematic campaign to destroy the history, memory, culture, and knowledge of a population. It is a practice that began with the Nakba [the exodus of the Palestinian people between June 1946 and May 1948] and is part of a policy that aims to realize a racist fantasy, which is Greater Israel," explains Lebanese historian, archaeologist, and archivist Jamila J. Ghaddar. Fighting Erasure (fighting erasure). "The goal is to collect and preserve information posted on Telegram, X, Facebook... and to document the genocide through the very population that experiences it," says Ghaddar. They face many challenges, working amidst bullets, bombs, sieges, and threats of all kinds, but they see the archive as a weapon of resistance.

"Faced with archival apartheid and the constant destruction and theft of historical archives and documents, several generations of Palestinians, together with allies and accomplices from across the region and around the world, have created a powerful counter-archive to preserve alternative histories and refute the narrative. their land and documents both the attempts at erasure and the resistance that opposes it.

Ukraine and the documentation of destruction

Since 2022, a team of archivists, researchers, and librarians from the United States, led by San Jose State University, has been working with the Ukrainian Library Association to document the destruction. "In 2023, we received 14 images of destroyed libraries, and between 2024 and 2025, the number of images increased significantly to over 500. When our project team receives the images from the Ukrainian Library Association, we add the goals and begin the process of preserving them," explains Kelly Famuliner of San Jose State University. "Ukrainian libraries are suffering very heavy losses in this war. At the same time, librarians are also becoming leaders within their communities. They exemplify an unbreakable spirit and strength, helping people overcome the challenges of war. Materials of this kind should also be included in the archive image. Russia," says Oksana Brui, president of the Ukrainian Library Association.

Archivists Without Borders trained archivists after the war in Sarajevo, and they have traveled to many other corners of the world to preserve the documentation of groups and peoples who must cope with authoritarian governments or lack resources. They have been working with the Sahrawi people for years. "They think that if they don't preserve this documentation, perhaps no one will be able to explain what happened to them. It's like a cry that says they are there, that they don't want to die or disappear completely," explains Núria Carreras, president of Archivists Without Borders, who at the International Congress of Archivists is presenting all the work being done to help preserve the archive. "The digitization of this archive is a priority because there are extreme temperatures and they lack the resources to protect it," she adds.

The Memory of the Elites

Minorities or stateless peoples or those in conflict are not the only ones who may be left voiceless in the archives. "In Catalonia, we have an extraordinary documentary heritage, comparable only to that of southern Germany or the Vatican," says Capellades. The problem is that these archives do not represent everyone. "They are the documents of the economic elites, public administrations, large corporations, and businesses. We don't have a real social spectrum: most of the producers of documentary collections are white, Catholic, and bourgeois men. There is a huge information gap about society. For example, if we want to know how Catalan was spoken on the street in the 16th or 17th centuries, we have to look at interrogations," he adds.

The great challenge for archives is to ensure that this social and gender bias does not perpetuate. "To avoid this, we must implement active archive intake policies," explains Capellades. For example, During the 2017 referendum, a campaign was carried out to capture social media posts. And other historic moments have been captured, such as the August 17th attack and COVID-19. "We are working to facilitate access to this documentation, and we will do so in the short term," Capellades explains. "For years, we in the archives have been working to give greater visibility to women's history, because historically, it hasn't been given the same importance as men's," admits Enric Cobo, Deputy Director General of Archives and Document Management.

Artificial intelligence as a tool

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a tool that is also changing access to historical documentation. There are millions and millions of documents, but digitization is slow. In 2023, there was a photographic heritage of 44 million negatives and positives, and only 1,333,000 million photographs are described and digitized in Online Archives. "It's very few, because there is a lack of human resources. With AI, the description and digitization of this collection can be greatly accelerated, and there are applications trained to do so," says Capellades.

Josep Lladós is the director of the Computer Vision Center, which collaborates with the Generalitat (Catalan government) to create AI tools to extract information from documentation. One of the projects is the analysis of five centuries of marriage documents from the archives of the diocese of Barcelona. "It's not just about finding names, but also relating them to be able to study, for example, how families have evolved or demographic changes," he explains. Another tool they've developed is for identifying and describing photographs, taking into account their cultural context. "AI can help us work better. There may be a certain isolation in historical archives, or it may be difficult to access documentation because it's stored in different archives. With AI, access is democratized and can make time travel possible. It changes the way we consume historical documents," says Lladó. "Large companies can take advantage of it."

The other major challenge is where all the digital documentation is stored. "There's a serious problem because long-term preservation hasn't been resolved. Furthermore, it's in private hands, and this is a very big risk. We need a public preservation system, but that requires an extraordinary investment," concludes Capelladas. For Cobo, it's also important that the archives preserve documentation with all the necessary guarantees: "In a context of misinformation and manipulation, the archives are the ones that must guarantee the veracity of the information."