Should a City Be Allowed to Forget?

I should declare an interest. I live in Westmere, and I have spent more hours than I could defend in the Corn Exchange search room, reading the borrowing ledgers of a nineteenth-century subscription library for a book about what the town’s shopkeepers read.2 When I heard about the vote, I did what a good many people here did: I wrote an indignant letter to the council, using the word “vandalism” twice. Then I asked Sallow if I could watch her work. I wanted to see the vandalism up close. What I saw instead was a far older and more difficult practice than I had understood, and one that has changed my mind about what an archive is for, though not, I should say, entirely in the council’s favor.

The council’s case is easy to caricature and hard to answer. The warehouse lease costs the town roughly what it pays two library assistants in a year, and the rent rises again next year. Westmere has lost a fifth of its central government grant since 2015; its swimming pool is shut three days a week; the waiting list for home care runs to 11 weeks. Alma Fenwick, who chairs the council’s finance committee and voted for the closure, put it to me without relish. “I have never had a resident come to my office to demand a dog license from 1953,” she said. “I have had dozens come about their mother’s care. I’m not proud of the choice. But it is a choice, and I would rather make it in daylight than pretend we can keep paying for everything.” It was hard to hear that and go on saying “vandalism.”

Every archive is mostly absence

Here is the first thing I learned, and the thing I most wish I had known before I wrote my letter: archives have always forgotten almost everything. The Westmere archive does not hold the town’s records. It holds a selection of them—by Sallow’s estimate, somewhere around 5 percent of the paper the council and its predecessors have produced since the borough was incorporated.^* The rest was destroyed long ago, mostly by the departments that created it, under retention schedules that tell a planning officer to shred applications after so many years and a payroll clerk to dispose of timesheets after so many more.3 What reaches the archive is what someone, at some point, decided had enduring value. The profession has a name for that decision. It is called appraisal, and it is by some distance the most consequential thing an archivist does.

“People think we’re in the business of keeping things,” Sallow told me, as we stood in an aisle of building-control files from the 1970s, each one a folder of drawings for somebody’s garage extension. “We’re in the business of choosing. Keeping is what happens to the things we chose.” She is 61, small, and unsentimental in the way of people who handle sentimental material for a living, and she has been Westmere’s archivist since 2003. In that time, she reckons, she has personally approved the destruction of more than 400 meters of records. She is not ashamed of the figure. She is wary of anyone who would be proud of it.

The methods are less mysterious than they sound. An archivist appraising a series of records asks who created it and why, whether the same information survives elsewhere in a more compact form, how often it has been consulted, and what it could tell someone in a hundred years that nothing else could. Minutes of the full council: keep, always; they are the spine of the record. Building-control files: keep those for historic buildings and public works, sample the rest. Dog licenses: the information they hold, who owned which dog on which street, is either duplicated in the rate books or, frankly, nobody’s business. For a long run of routine records the usual answer is to keep one year in ten, so that a future historian can see what the series looked like and roughly what it contained without the town shelving every page. The dog license registers, 5.8 meters of them running from 1921 to 1974, will be sampled that way. Admiral’s year was not among the years chosen.

Watching this, I felt my indignation curdling into something less comfortable. I had thought of the archive as a memory and the council as an amnesiac. But the archive had been forgetting, deliberately and expertly, for more than 70 years. The cut was not a new kind of act. It was the old act done faster, under pressure, and in public. Which raised a question I had never thought to ask: if the archive has always forgotten, how did it decide what to forget, and who was in the room when it did?

The list from 1958

Sallow keeps the answer in a gray folder marked “Housekeeping.” Among invoices for shelving and letters about damp there is a single typed sheet, dated October 1958 and signed by the borough librarian, who in those days doubled as archivist. It lists the records he removed that year to make room for files from the new council offices. I asked if I could copy it out.

Read it twice and the shape of the problem appears. What went to the pulper were the records in which the town’s poorest residents appear by name, in their own words or close to them: the applications for relief, each a page on which a widow or a laid-off net-maker explained to the guardians why the rent could not be paid. What was kept, and bound in leather, was the mayor’s correspondence and the printed menus of civic dinners. The librarian was not, so far as anyone can tell, a cruel man.4 He was making the judgment his profession made almost everywhere in his time: that the history worth keeping was the history of institutions and the people who ran them, and the rest was clutter. The result is that a historian who wants to know what Westmere’s mayors thought about the slump of the 1930s has 26 bound volumes to work with, and one who wants to know what it was like to be poor in Westmere during the slump has almost nothing.

This is the part of the story that should make anyone nervous about a council deciding, under budget pressure, what a town gets to remember. Forgetting is never neutral. It follows the grain of whoever holds the pen, and for most of history the pen was held by people who found the lives of the poor, the young, the foreign, and the female less worth recording than their own. Archives that look comprehensive are full of these silences, and silences do not announce themselves. Nobody browsing the search room catalog would notice that the relief books are missing, because nothing on the shelves suggests they ever existed.

Nothing, that is, except that typed sheet. And here is the second thing I learned, the one that turned my argument around: the most valuable document in the gray folder is the one that records the destruction. Because the librarian wrote down what he pulped, and roughly why, we know the size and shape of the hole. Local historians have used his list to go looking for the relief applicants elsewhere, in court records, newspaper notices, and parish registers, and have found some of them.^† His judgment was wrong. His list was right. The cruelty was in the judgment; the honesty was in the list.

The hoard that cannot be read

If 1958 is one way for a town to forget, there is another, newer way, and it looks like its opposite. Upstairs from the strongroom, in an office with a window onto the Corn Exchange’s old trading floor, Tomas Reyl manages what the council calls its electronic records and what he calls, with a weariness that suggests he has said it in meetings, “the pile.” Since 2004 the council has kept every email sent or received by its staff. Nobody decided this, exactly. The software kept everything by default, deleting anything would have required someone to decide what, and nobody wanted to be that someone. The pile now holds, by Reyl’s estimate, about 280 million messages, 61 terabytes in all.^‡

It is tempting to see the pile as the overflow store’s happy opposite, the triumph of a technology that made keeping free. It is nothing of the kind. The storage is the cheap part. The expensive parts are the licenses for the software that holds it, the security reviews it must pass, the migration to a new system every seven or eight years, each one a fresh chance to corrupt, misfile, or drop something, and above all the cost of finding anything in it. When a resident makes a request under the town’s open-records rules, Reyl’s team must search the pile, and a single query about a planning dispute can return 40,000 messages, every one of which must be read before any of it can be released. Reyl put it more simply. “Keeping everything is a way of deciding nothing. And then someone has to decide anyway, under a deadline, one message at a time.”

The pile is also, more quietly, forgetting. In a drawer of Reyl’s desk is a shoebox of floppy disks transferred from the planning department in 2009, holding documents written in a word processor that no machine in the building can now open.5 Some of the council’s early web pages, which for a few years in the late 1990s were the only place certain notices appeared, survive only as fragments captured by outside crawlers. Digital records do not fade gracefully, the way paper stays legible for centuries in a damp basement. They work perfectly until the day they do not work at all. A town that keeps everything digital without appraising it is not remembering more than the librarian of 1958. It is forgetting without a list.

And it is a hoard full of people. Somewhere in those 280 million messages are complaints about neighbors, references for job applicants, notes from social workers, and a quantity of gossip that its authors would not want read aloud in a hundred years, or in five. The paper archive was protected, crudely, by its own bulk: to find something embarrassing about a particular person you had to know where to look and be willing to spend a week in the search room. A searchable hoard has no such protection. Every name in it is a few keystrokes away.

The right to be let go

Which is how forgetting stopped being an abstract question in Westmere and became a personal one. In 2019 the library finished digitizing the town’s weekly newspaper, the Westmere Courier, from 1888 to 2001, and made the whole run searchable online. It was a wonderful project, and I use it constantly. A year later a man I will call Neil wrote to the archive. In 1987, at 19, he had been fined for his part in a fight outside a pub on the harbor, and the Courier had reported the case in a paragraph of court news. For three decades that paragraph sat in a bound volume nobody opened. Now his name, typed into any search engine, returned it as the first result, and his granddaughter had found it while doing a school project on the family.6

Neil did not ask for the newspaper to be destroyed; he knew better than that. He asked whether the paragraph could be taken out of the search index, so that it would still exist on the page but would not leap out at anyone who typed his name. Sallow’s instinct, as a professional, was to refuse. An archive that edits its holdings on request is not an archive; it is a press office. Her instinct as a person was different. “He was 19,” she said. “He was fined about a week’s wages. He has crewed the lifeboat for 25 years. What exactly is the public interest in making sure his granddaughter reads about the worst night of his life before she reads about anything else?”

Against Neil’s request I want to set the story of a woman who would be appalled by it. Bernadette Coyle, now 67, spent eight years of her childhood in the children’s home the borough ran on Rope Walk until 1979. For most of her adult life she believed that no record of that time survived; she had been told so, more than once, by people who did not want to look. In 2011 Sallow found her file in an unlisted box among the borough’s old social services records. It ran to 140 pages. Coyle read it in the search room over three days, with a support worker beside her. Much of it was painful. Some of it was untrue. All of it, she told me, was precious, because it was the only proof that she had been a child in a particular place, with a particular coat and a particular friend whose name she had forgotten until she saw it typed. “If somebody had decided my file wasn’t worth the shelf space,” she said, “I’d have been erased twice.”

Neil wants a record to be harder to find. Coyle needed a record to exist at all. Both are claims about forgetting, both seem to me entirely just, and they point in opposite directions. What they share is a recognition that an archive is not a neutral store of the past but a machine for deciding who can find whom, and when. What they reveal is that forgetting is not one act. It is at least four: destroying a record, sampling it, closing it for a period of years, and removing it from the index while leaving it on the shelf. Each forgets something different, for someone different, for a different length of time.^§ A town that can only choose between keeping everything and pulping it has not really thought about the question at all.

An honest kind of forgetting

So here is where I have ended up, after four months of colored dots, and it is not where my letter began. A city should be allowed to forget. It has no choice and has never had one; the alternative is either the bankrupting fantasy of keeping everything on paper or the corrosive reality of keeping everything in a pile nobody can read. But it should be required to forget honestly, and honesty here has a few concrete meanings.

It means forgetting in public. Over three evenings in May, Sallow held open sessions in the library at which anyone could come and argue for a series of records, and residents did: the fishermen’s association for the harbor dues ledgers, a retired surveyor for the drainage plans, Coyle and two other former residents of Rope Walk for every page the home ever produced.7 Several decisions changed as a result. It means writing down what was destroyed and why, in a register that is itself never destroyed, so that the shape of every hole is known. It means preferring the gentler forms of forgetting, closure and de-indexing and sampling, for records that describe living people, and the harder form, destruction, for records that describe nothing much at all. And it means asking, every time, the question the librarian of 1958 never thought to ask: whose lives are in this box, and would anyone else have kept them?

None of this is free. Public sessions take staff time; registers of destruction take care; reading a run of files for the people in them takes far longer than slapping a red dot on a box. When I put these principles to Fenwick, she agreed with every one of them and asked how I proposed to pay for them, which is the right question and one I could not fully answer. But I notice that the same council found the money to digitize a century of newspapers and to keep 61 terabytes of email it has never read. Honest forgetting is cheaper than dishonest remembering. It is simply harder to explain at a budget meeting.

On my last afternoon in the warehouse, Sallow showed me the register she has started for this year’s disposals: a plain cloth-bound ledger with numbered pages, the first 30 already filled in her small, upright hand. Series, dates, extent, decision, reason, and who was consulted. Under the dog license registers she had written: 5.8 m. Sampled, years ending in 4 retained. Remainder destroyed. Information duplicated in rate books; three requests since 2003. And clipped to the page with a brass paper fastener was something I had not expected: a photocopy of a single entry, a liver-and-white spaniel licensed to a fish merchant on Quay Street in March 1953. I asked her why. She looked faintly embarrassed, which I had not seen before. “So that whoever reads this knows what we were throwing away,” she said. “It isn’t the same as keeping him. But it’s honest about what we didn’t.”