ABSTRACT
In his first presidential address to the Society of Archivists in 1955, Sir Hilary Jenkinson stated that the essential and primary responsibilities of the archivist are ‘the duties of conserving the evidence and of communicating it to the student public’ (Jenkinson 1956). This was true then and is even more so now, nearly fifty years later, when improved awareness of and accessibility to archival collections, outreach and the exploitation of resources are increasing concerns. Archivists are the preservers of the recorded past: they seek out, classify and catalogue the documentary heritage in whatever format it comes, whether in medieval manuscript or modern electronic text, in image, or in sound files; they make it available for research and safeguard it for the future. Archival institutions exist to house collections of records to nationally adopted standards and to keep them safe against the time when they may be called up to further some kind of research or answer an enquiry. They are kept equally, even if no one uses the material for years: historical evidence should surely be conserved simply because history exists.
