IntroductionFootnote 1
In 2007 in Morocco, law 69/99, enacted by royal decree (dahir) that year,Footnote 2 established the main principles for the organization of public and private archives and for the creation and administration of an “Archives of Morocco” (AdM), a national archival institution. The organization itself was set up in 2011 with the nomination of a director, before opening to the public in 2013. In spite of Morocco’s reputation for being a very centralized State, the creation of its national archives appears to be a particularly late development, especially in comparison with other countries in the region. AdM is facing the same challenges as other archival institutions in the world, as well as challenges related more specifically to its recent establishment.
The four missions of AdM are the usual ones of national archival institutions: to “promote and coordinate the management programme of current and intermediate archives” for State services at all levels,Footnote 3 to “safeguard and promote the enhancement of the national archival heritage,” to “establish the standardization of practices of collection, selection, elimination, classification, description and conservation” of archives, and finally to promote archival practices through “scientific research, professional training and international cooperation.”Footnote 4 The institution is presented as an ambitious project. In a brochure presenting the institution to visitors, a quotation from Derrida’s Archive Fever is printed on the cover, below the title “Archives du Maroc:” “The question of the archive is not a question of the past (…) but rather a question of the future, the very question of the future, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow.”Footnote 5 More than a simple reference to a famous philosophical reflection on archives, Derrida’s words set the tone of how AdM’s main actors wish to present the archive: not as a backward-looking institution in the typical image of dusty piles of paper, but rather as a modern forward-looking institution.
Indeed, its creation was in large part the result of a recommendation stemming from the work of a transitional justice experience in Morocco, which dealt between 2004 and 2006 with the cases of victims of the repressive regime during the “Years of Lead.” AdM is therefore strongly connected to ideas of accountability and transparency of public action, and more generally to ideas of good governance.
Digital tools and digitization take place within that framework, and contribute to the presentation of the institution as a modern one. What does the setting up of digitization mean when it is concomitant with the birth of an archival institution, rather than being brought in later? Is the digitization of archives simply an additional tool for conservation, or do the possibilities it offers, or the constraints it brings, modify reflection on the organization of archival collection, conservation, and dissemination? This article explores the role of digitization in the institutional creation of AdM. It does so through an analysis of archival policy as public policy and of “archives-as-institutions”Footnote 6 by looking at public documentation, newspaper articles, and using semi-structured interviews conducted in 2016 and 2017 with staff at AdM and other related institutions. I will show that digitization, far from being a purely technical matter, has played a central role in the political presentation of AdM.
In the first section of the article I shall present the creation of AdM in more detail, and show how a narrative of modernity, in connection with ideas of transparency and good governance, has been central to discourses about the institution. In the second section, I shall explore how digitization has been central to that narrative through its evolving role as a standard of international modernity: first, through the incorporation of digitization as a daily practice in line with international standards; second, through international cooperation on digitization. I shall examine in more detail the case of colonial archives, or how a potential bone of contention has been turned into a basis for international cooperation. Finally, the last section of the article focuses on how digitization has tentatively been included in the collection process, and on how such a costly process might actually hinder relations with Moroccan government ministries. That leads to the conclusion, which returns to the notion of modernity and suggests that it might be an essential notion for AdM in the current Moroccan context.
“Archives du Maroc” as Archives for the Future? A Narrative of Good Governance and Modernity
Before turning to the exploration of the role of the digital in Archives du Maroc, it is important to examine the reasons underlying the creation of the institution at a specific historical time. Indeed, in its very conception the institution was thought of as a way to improve democratic governance and transparency. The digital is only one element in that particular discourse and performance of modernity.
The turning point for archival policy in Morocco is the 2007 law mentioned above. The purpose of the law was to fill a legal void regarding archives in Morocco, where not much had been done about them since the country gained independence in 1956. During the protectorate indeed, two dahirs were enacted by the French General Resident, the first creating the archives of the French protectorate in 1913 then, in 1926, a subsequent decree assigning responsibility for the management of administrative archives to the General library of the protectorate. In 1954 an order from the Resident had made the organization of archives and their transmission to the General library mandatory for ministries. After the protectorate the Rabat General library remained in charge of certain archives, mostly from before 1912, the Tetouan General library dealt mostly with archives from the Spanish administration, and the Royal library kept documents from the Makhzen.Footnote 7 A portion of the archives from the protectorate were transferred to France, the rest remaining with individual ministries for practical reasons. For archives produced after 1956 each central or local administration was in charge, which led to different results depending on individual ministries. Some, especially those dealing with property, maintained very good archives.Footnote 8 Others however had neither space nor time for them which, combined with a dahir from 1926 mandating the disposal of archives that had been inactive for more than ten years, led some to destroy them or leave them lying in basements.Footnote 9
After the protectorate, the first decision about the archives came only in 1968. Given the financial difficulties of the General library, the Prime Minister oriented the transmission of archives towards other institutions, such as the Ministry of Communication or the General Secretariat of the Government. However, a few years later each administration was again put in charge of managing its own archive. Finally, in 1980 a decree was enacted which promoted the conservation of legal archives because of their potential use in legal proceedings.Footnote 10 Thus in the early 1980s for example, an account of access to Moroccan archives explains that “[a]dministrative archives generally belong to the ministry in which they were generated.”Footnote 11 Not much concerning those policies changed during the 1990s.
In that context the 2007 law appeared as a revolution in Moroccan archival policy. However, like all revolutions this one did not emerge from nowhere. Press articles and my interviewees alike present the 2007 law and the subsequent creation of AdM as the result of a recommendation formulated by the Moroccan Equity and Reconciliation Commission (ERC)Footnote 12 a “truth commission” set up by King Mohammed VI in January 2004. In reality the ERC continued work that had been started in the 1990s even before the death of King Hassan II. It was seen as a way to deal with the regime’s repressive past, mainly through financial compensation for victims and their families.Footnote 13 It was also a continuation of the regime’s method of dealing with human rights matters, which had been to assemble groups of experts to tackle some specific question.Footnote 14 The commission issued its report in 2006 and among its results, as part of the section on monitoring mechanisms one recommendation was the ERC’s archives should be maintained. More generally, the report recommended that the conservation of “public archives” be organized.Footnote 15
Nevertheless, one of the experts interviewed for this work,Footnote 16 an archive specialist who regularly worked as a consultant for AdM, traces the first drafts of the legislation as far back as the 1990s, which he mentions too in interviews with the press.Footnote 17 According to him, it was not the recommendation of the ERC that led mechanically to the adoption of a law on archives and to the creation of the institution. Rather, it was the result of a ten-year process during which the draft circulated between ministries and Parliament. The head of AdM, Jamaâ Baida,Footnote 18 himself a historian, also provided more historical perspective on the emergence of a “need for archives.” In his view, the first time after independence that the need for archives emerged was at the time of the Green March in 1975, when Morocco needed archives to defend the “Marocanité” of Western Sahara, where it appeared that archives were dispersed throughout different centres and royal palaces. The Directorate of Royal Archives, created in that context, was put in charge of collecting patrimonial archives.
Ultimately I am rather less interested here in applying process-tracing methods to the analysis of the creation of AdM. I shall rather concentrate on the current narrative and discourses about the institution. My chief interest is in fact in the pervasiveness of references to transparency, good governance and, ultimately, “modernity” in this narrative. Although it is a complex and contested idea, “modernity” is often identified with reference to different elements. Those include the rise of capitalism and of individualism, ideas of progress and science and of rationalization and professionalization, industrialization, and urbanization are identified as are secularization and the development of the nation-state. In all those instances the idea of modernity is characterized by rupture and difference.Footnote 19 In postcolonial contexts, the promotion of a “rights-based approach to development” by development agencies and NGOs has put human rights at the heart of modernization processes. The promotion of “good governance” too by international organizations, as a way of ensuring the effectiveness of aid, has helped the circulation of ideas about transparency. We may therefore examine the framing of the creation of AdM as part of a modernizing of the state and as an articulation between human rights, transparency, and administrative as well as government modernity as part of a larger movement. The digital and digitization, I would argue, are only one element of a larger narrative of the modernity of archives.
Indeed, archives have been considered characteristic of the modern state. As Derrida put it in Archive Fever, “there is no political power without control of the archive.”Footnote 20 One might rephrase that to state that there is no modern state without control of the archive. It is indeed a form of control connected in a quite striking way to the outcomes of the enlightenment project. Foucault, for example, discussed libraries and museums as heterotopias, writing that:
The idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. The museum and the library are heterotopias that are proper to western culture of the nineteenth century.Footnote 21
The idea of organizing and controlling knowledge is closely tied to the emergence and functioning of the state, including in its imperial form. Ann Laura Stoler describes the connection between the archive and power: “The archive was the supreme technology of the late nineteenth-century imperial state, a repository of codified beliefs that clustered (and bore witness to) connections between secrecy, the law, and power.”Footnote 22 More specifically, the colonial project that the archive is tied to is one of colonial modernity, hinged in part on “a disciplining of one’s agents.”Footnote 23
Although that concerns mostly the creation and organization of documents, the creation of national institutions dealing with and centralizing archives is similarly part of the modern state project. The creation of a national archival institution, situated in a specific place, implies legal, constitutional and historical “legitimacy”Footnote 24 and highlights the strongly political role of archives as an institution. The Moroccan archival project is connected to the idea of modernity from different aspects. First it appears as a project of archiving the state, which in itself signals modernity. It also signals the transformation of a “former colony” into a “modern nation”Footnote 25. Second, the idea of modernity is highlighted in different documents which present it and is closely tied to transparency and governance. The idea of the accountability of the state to its citizens is another aspect of archival projectsFootnote 26 and includes the question of publicizing archives, which amount to decisions about how archives are communicated and to whom.Footnote 27 In other contexts, claims might be made about specific occurrences from the past or the matter of missing archives. Finally, in some situations transparency is connected to an idea of modernity. In the Turkish case for example, Meltem Ahıska argues that “claims of transparency and democracy for the archives, advanced by official archivists and historians, point to one register of ‘truth,’ which is informed by power relations, but also shaped in relation to the timeless fantasy of Turkey being a modern/Western country.”Footnote 28
Similarly, in Morocco the connection between transparency and the idea of modernity is clearly visible in the politics leading to the creation of AdM. The 2006 report of the ERC recommending the preservation of memory states that it requires a “global revision of the situation of public archives and the setting up of the conditions for a profound reform.” That should include the “organization of archives and of a national institution in charge of archives in a well-defined and transparent legal framework” and training in archive work to ensure the presence of people with “competence and know-how necessary to a rational and democratic management of the archive.”Footnote 29 Modernity is present in the references to rupture (the “profound reform”) and to rationalization. It is even clearer in an article published in 2007 by Driss El Yazami, an important member of the ERC and then future president of the National Council of Human Rights (Conseil National des Droits de l’Homme, CNDH). In an article about the ERC and reflecting on “political transition, history and memory,” El Yazami dedicates a section to the advocacy of “a modern policy for public and private archives.”Footnote 30 As part of the programme ensuring the implementation of the ERC’s implementation, the CNDH also set up a working group dedicated to the matter of “archives, history, and the preservation of memory,” with the mission to “further reflect on this issue and to pursue the project of modernization of the national archives.”Footnote 31
What role do digital technologies play in this context? As noted by Appadurai in his examination of Modernity at Large, “electronic media” is an essential part of globalized modernity. Electronic media have changed how we apprehend circulation and time; they have also offered resources for self-making.Footnote 32 The place of the digital in the Moroccan archival project plays within this ambition of international or even globalized modernity. It has been, in particular, a useful way to perform modernity. The presentation of the archival project as a modern example of transparency and good governance is reinforced by the presence of electronic equipment and technology, by their use, and by the self-imposition of high technical standards, which helps to fit in what Appadurai calls the “megarhetoric of developmental modernization (economic growth, high technology, agribusiness, schooling, militarization).”Footnote 33 The digital allows AdM to perform a visible norm of international modernity, enacting it through technology. As anthropologists have noted, modernity functions as a narrative of people about themselves.Footnote 34 In this case, the insistence of the archivists and civil servants in charge of the archives on the modernity of AdM is particularly visible through their highlighting of modern equipment and practices of using the digital during interviews, or on a tour of AdM, as I shall show below. It is noticeable too in the presentation of AdM’s website as “dynamic,” which takes up half a page of the eight-page presentation brochure of the institution,Footnote 35 or on the presentation of its activities on its Facebook page.Footnote 36 It also appears in a report of the Moroccan Court of Auditors evaluating the work of AdM for the year 2015. In that evaluation the lack of electronic organization or digital archiving is considered a hindrance to the progress of AdM towards modernity. The report notes, for example, that “the electronic conservation of archives has not yet been set up. This suggests a discrepancy with the modern management of archives,”Footnote 37 or that “Archives du Maroc does not possess an information system which would allow it to ensure a modern and rational management of its administrative and professional affairs.”Footnote 38
The rhetorical insistence on the electronic and the digital as elements of the modern setting of AdM does not prevent those elements from actually playing an important role in the new Moroccan archival policy. The digital, which is praised as an element of modernity, can appear both as a facilitator and as a constraint to the work of AdM, both in international cooperation and in domestic archival policy. The next sections will focus on the material aspects of AdM’s digital archival work.
The Digital as an Indicator of International Modernity
How does digitization fit into this narrative of modernity? In this section, I shall first turn to the place of digitization as a daily practice at AdM. I shall look in particular at how the equipment of scanners, though limited, displays the modern ambitions of the institution. Secondly I shall turn to international cooperation on the digitization of colonial archives, and show how the institutional discourse presents that cooperation as a modern, forward-looking way to deal with complex historical material.
First, digitization plays a role in the daily functioning of the institution, and in displaying its modernity. As noted by Christine Jungen, archival institutions require human and non-human resources to implement a daily practice of the archive, and digitization fits within that practice as a continuation of older practices of reproduction.Footnote 39 In the case of AdM, scanners and digitization are presented as daily practices of conservation and communication of archives. AdM itself is housed in the former colonial general library, a relatively small building, and the institution is expected to be moved to an improved purpose-built site. However, the staff of AdM pride themselves on working in an institution that has everything an archive needs, but on a reduced scale. The inventory could cite appropriate shelving, special archival boxes, security and surveillance systems – as well as the scanners.
Jamaâ Baida as director of AdM identifies three main roles for digitization. The first is to digitize patrimonial archives, which raises questions of priority and choices. The second purpose is to help deal with colonial archives as “shared history,” while finally digitization ought to help ministries organize their own archives and facilitate later donations to AdM.Footnote 40 Since April 2016 AdM has had two small digitization workshops, equipped with blackout curtains. In the first workshop, a scanner allows scanning of very large formats up to A1 and for digitization of, for example, registers. According to the staff it is the first of its type in Morocco. It has an accessory tool which can scan documents which cannot be opened up and laid flat, and another tool giving the capability to digitize panes of glass or other transparent archives. A second scanner is dedicated to A2 formats, and functions with a matrix camera rather than a mobile camera.
In the second workshop there are three scanners. One is for A3-A4 formats and has an automatic feeder which allows for quicker digitization if documents are in good condition. A second one is for scanning large A0 formats, such as maps. Finally, there is another scanner similar to the A2 scanner in the first workshop. The plan is to use that one in the consultation room, for users who might request a one-off digitization of some specific document.Footnote 41
Through the description of these scanners and their accessories we can see the role of digitization as a tool of conservation and preservation on the one hand, and as a tool of dissemination. By minimizing the need for future manipulation, the scanning of fragile documents helps preserve them, while a digital version can be easily transmitted to the public.Footnote 42 Besides the scanning workshops, other electronic and digital outfits serve to mobilize resources at AdM. First, there is a small technical team in charge of dealing with all information systems. In addition, approximately ten of a total of forty-three people employed by AdM concentrate on the processing of documents. They sort them, then encode them to enrich the digital catalogue. That team is in charge of digitization too. Overall, electronic equipment, including the digitizing devices, is part of the daily work of the institution and crucial to its ambitions, although it is relatively limited in scale and would probably not be able to accommodate large-scale digitization. All the same, by displaying how AdM’s direction and staff are aware of digitization and its possibilities it occupies an important place in the narrative of modernity. AdM and its staff show that they are fully informed of international standards and practices in their field and make it clear that AdM is prepared for the future.
Another important aspect of digitization is the role it plays in international cooperation on archives. The creation of AdM, although its main logic seems to have been first and foremost domestic, was not isolated from international influence. First of all, most of the people involved in the Moroccan reflection on archives had studied in France.Footnote 43 That means that the archival culture of some of the most important characters in the story of AdM was shaped by their experience in French universities or their work with French institutions.Footnote 44 Furthermore, after they arrived at the institution some of AdM’s staff had more specific training. Some people benefited from month-long technical attachments to the National Archives or three-months at the Institut National du Patrimoine in France. During interviews references to international cooperation were significant. Interviewees talked about “benchmarking” and learning from foreign texts, regulatory tools and experiences. They had seen this mainly in Canada, France, and Tunisia, but elsewhere too, like Senegal. “Whenever we see movement forward somewhere, we look at what is being done.”Footnote 45 International experts from Tunisia,Footnote 46 France, and Canada have been invited to different events organized by AdM, or even to consult on the different steps of setting up the organization.
Digital tools help facilitate and continue these international training and exchange dynamics. For example, AdM is a member of the International Council on Archives (ICA)Footnote 47 and of the International Francophone Archival Portal (PIAF)Footnote 48 which allows the institution to benefit from the training platform. It “helps a lot to advise civil servants who are not archivists and start to study from the online platform of the PIAF,” where there are courses on every topic from the management of current records to the final collection of definitive archives. According to the head of division of the administrative archives at AdM, there has been an increase in Moroccan usage of the portal, which is interpreted as a sign of interest on the part of the ministries.Footnote 49
Regarding archival digitization more specifically, the material aspect of that too has been a topic of international exchange. One of the scanners – actually the one which will be used in the consultation room – was acquired through a partnership with the Centre Jacques Berque (CJB), a French research centre in Rabat.Footnote 50 That project was about the history of the Rif region of Morocco, and in particular of the uprising of 1958–1959 and its violent repression. It was therefore part of the “ERC 2” programme of the National Centre for Human Rights (Conseil National des Droits de l’Homme, CNDH), funded by the European Commission, which followed the recommendations of the IER report.Footnote 51 Since the programme dealt with archives, a partnership was set up between the CJB and AdM to process and digitize those archives. The CJB acquired a scanner with the provision that AdM would keep it after the end of the project.Footnote 52 An agreement of that sort shows both how uncertain and limited AdM’s financing is, and how international cooperation has been used to strengthen its capacities. It shows too how digitization tools are perceived as central to the setting up of the institution.
One more aspect of digitizing archives and international cooperation, that of colonial archives, shows how AdM is perceived by its main actors and presented by them as a forward-looking project for the future, rather than as an institution preoccupied only with the past. Indeed, the last part of article 27 of law 69/99 specifies that AdM must be put in charge of “collecting, processing, preserving and communicating archival sources pertaining to Morocco and that are abroad.”Footnote 53 The official mission of AdM regarding those archives is to “collect” rather than repatriate them, giving the institution more leeway in the matter. While efforts have been dedicated to repatriating archives, that has not necessarily been the primary focus of AdM. Digitization is perceived as a facilitating tool in negotiations on the topic; a way to ease the division and sharing of archives. During an interview, Jamaâ Baida insisted that AdM as an institution is firmly in charge of the future, rather than delving into the past too much. When it comes to colonial archives, he advocates a position of compromise and negotiation:
[Colonial archives] do not belong to us, for the time being. They are colonial archives, and what I say is that it is a shared history, and this shared history, instead of being – at least this is my point of view, it is not shared by many of my colleagues in the Arab region – I think it is a shared history, a shared memory. History is what it is, archives that are of interest to us are now located in France, in Spain, in England, in Italy, in Germany, just about anywhere in the world, in the United States. Instead of them being a bone of contention, I would like them to be a common ground for cooperation. This is what I have been trying to do, in particular with France, which I still know a bit better.Footnote 54
Jamaâ Baida’s view is interesting, particularly because it is in stark contrast to, for instance, the Algerian position. The Algerians have been advocating a “full transfer” of colonial archives for many years, against the French preference for “limited repatriation.”Footnote 55 Although the French-Algerian Dispute has gone on ever since Algerian independence in 1962, it is far more important today than it was then. Some claim that that Dispute was central to the adoption of the 1983 Vienna Convention, the UN text of reference in matters of archival disputes.Footnote 56 The Algerians have certainly been very vocal on the subject in international arenas such as the ICA and the PIAF. For instance, they successfully lobbied the ICA for the introduction of the notion of the “displaced archive” in its classification. Although Algeria signed an agreement on archival cooperation with France in 2009, it is still pushing for full transfer of colonial archives and arguing at the ICA against the neutrality of the international institution and in favor of stronger actions to balance between privileged and less privileged countries.Footnote 57
The relatively recent creation of the Moroccan institution might also help explain not only how it came to be created with the digital already in mind but perhaps too why digitization is more directly perceived as a tool of practice, including in international negotiations and cooperation. Technological novelties can in some cases resolve archival disputes at least partially, as with microfilms in the past, but are accepted only insofar as they fit the political narrative about the archives.Footnote 58 As underlined by Shepard in the case of Algerian archives, or by Bat in the case of Congo-Brazzaville, archival disputes are connected to internal affairs as well as to the narrative that the government and its actors wish to present about the state.Footnote 59 In the case of Morocco, AdM is connected to the idea of promoting historical research and to a project to “archive the nation”Footnote 60 and so has an interest in past documents. However, the centrality of ideas on transparency in the creation of AdM make it very much about archiving the state. Indeed, perhaps it is more about that, which would explain the lesser insistence on colonial archives.Footnote 61 This allows Jamaâ Baida to formulate through the idea of “shared history” a discourse closer to historical debates than to archival ones. The idea of shared history is tied to the emergence of “connected history” or “global history” as more symmetrical studies of international circulations and transfers, including of ideas.Footnote 62 In this case the use of the concept not only reaffirms Morocco’s place in history but allows Baida to focus pragmatically on other aspects more central to the existence of AdM.
Presenting digitization as a solution to the archives of shared history, Jamaâ Baida mentions a number of current projects with France. For example, a number of archives – though not enough, in his view – have already been transferred to Morocco in various digital formats. Possibilities are limited by the cost of digitizing and of keeping digital data, which is why the strategy of AdM has been to start with the easiest documents, meaning those archives that were already digitized and which are “as easy as a click” to send. In addition, a convention was signed in 2013 with the French Diplomatic Archives to cooperate so that AdM is able to receive digitized documents as well as to request the digitization of more documents. For example in 2016, AdM requested documents from the French Diplomatic Archives in Nantes, mainly the “tribes’ records,” reports by the French administration during the protectorate. Those were documents containing a lot of information about populations, local political organization and traditions, as well as meteorological reports, information on flora and fauna; or other details used for the colonial administration of Morocco. Jamaâ Baida, explained he knew this archival fonds and thought it would be useful as a source of information on that period, especially since Morocco is pursuing a policy favoring regions and regional powers.Footnote 63 Similarly, the “gift” of the French in November 2017 of archives on Moroccan JudaismFootnote 64 was connected to a convention signed between AdM and the French Shoah Memorial the year before.Footnote 65 It is interesting to note that the cooperation has involved AdM, the French Diplomatic Archives, the French Shoah Memorial, as well as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which participated in a large part of the digitization process.Footnote 66 The number of partners involved in the process and the fact that negotiations on the acquisition of copies of more fonds are “ongoing” are indicators not only of the interest raised by international historical matters, but also of the high cost of digitization.
To conclude, provision of scanners and international cooperation on the digitization of colonial archives are similar ways to perform modernity at AdM, first by showing knowledge of the required equipment and standards and second by displaying a forward-looking attitude to repatriation of colonial archives. Digitization is used as both a negotiation tool and a stepping-stone for building historical collections. Technology and the international both function as signifiers of modernity, although the presentation of digitization as a facilitating tool is sometimes limited by its high cost, as reflected in the state of digitization of domestic archives.
A (Too) Costly Affair?
The digitization of archives is not only AdM’s problem. Its modest means have meant that the institution has had to be creative in finding ways to move forward, including in digitization, as seen in section 2 in its international cooperation. The same has been true in its domestic relations with ministries. Because of the recent character of the legal framework for the creation and functioning of AdM, digitization has been included directly in the formulation of the process of transferring archives. That can be both an advantage and a limitation to the AdM’s work with other Moroccan institutions collecting archives.
As described above, the equipment and means for AdM are limited, which will constrain any further digital projects. The limits are not only financial, for there is limited space, as well as difficulties in recruiting trained staff, since historically the occupation of archivist in Morocco did not really exist.Footnote 67 The constraints combined with the limited size of the scanning workshops hamper AdM in its work of digitizing the archives it owns now or any future archives it might acquire. Jamaâ Baida raised the point in our interview: according to him it is impossible to digitize everything, even for patrimonial archives,Footnote 68 so that given the limited resources, choices have to be made. Decisions about what is saved and what is destroyed are important in deciding what memories will be preserved, and as such are influenced by power relations.Footnote 69 In fact, archivists often highlight the importance of destruction in their job. They point out that keeping absolutely everything would make the past illegible to future historians. Similarly, choices must be made for digitization, although they are not necessarily based on the same criteria. Once something has been kept as a physical archive, the decision to digitize takes into account most of all the demand for the document, and its fragility. As Baida explains, the priority is to digitize the most fragile documents, since they cannot be disseminated physically. According to him, the second type of document that needs digitization, with the aim of ensuring they do not become more fragile, are those in greatest demand.Footnote 70
The limited means of AdM affect their relations with Moroccan ministries too. Indeed, one of the main missions and purposes of the institution is to convince all Moroccan ministries that they should collect and process archives in a standardized way and then transfer them to AdM for conservation. AdM must then train them in how to do so. It is a future-oriented project, and the current building would not in any case have enough space to receive all such archives. However, all interviewees described it as the central mission of the institution. Accordingly, the eight-page brochure presenting Archives du Maroc to the public lists four main functions, of which two concern the digitization of archives. The first mentioned function is to “promote and coordinate the programme of archival management of current and intermediate archives in State services, territorial authorities, public establishments and companies as well as private companies in charge of a public service;” the second is to “establish the normalization of practices of collection, selection, elimination, classification, description, preventive conservation, restoration and substitution of archival mediums.”Footnote 71 Connecting both missions, one can see how AdM’s relations with ministries take digitization as a “substitution of archival mediums.”
Given the limited means of AdM both for hosting physical archives for the time being, and for digitization, other solutions had to be found. One idea has been to involve ministries more directly, and the first step was a circulaire published in 2011Footnote 72 by then-Prime Minister Abbas El Fassi. The document called for public ministries to collaborate with AdM and lays down that ministries are in charge of organizing the collection and conservation of their current and intermediate archives while they wait for AdM to be ready to receive all the transfers.Footnote 73 In that context AdM is in charge of training ministries in collection, elimination and conservation standards, which it has been doing mainly using conservation calendars and a reflection on a common guide of reference on the process.Footnote 74 In addition, following this less formal circulaire, a decree of application was published in 2015 to complete law 69/99 by determining the details of its implementation.Footnote 75 It is interesting to note that in that decree, article 6 lists digitization as one of the steps in archive management by ministries. It says, “operations of archival management include the inventory, classifications, processing and elaboration of appropriate research instrument, as well as conservation, exploitation, promotion, sorting, digitization and their transfer to Archives du Maroc or their destruction, depending on the case.”Footnote 76 The decree also specifies in its article 20 that ministries exceptionally authorized to keep their definitive archives, are to transmit digital copies of documents to AdM. For a law adopted in the digital age, the implementing decree already includes a reflection on the topic, and no need for special legislation is required. What the decree does, in effect, is lay the burden and cost of digitization on ministries, so as to discharge AdM from the job and its cost. According to Jamaâ Baida, it also allows ministries to keep digital copies of their own archives, even once they are considered definitive. Ministries may therefore retain their own records of their work; the original physical documents, to be kept at AdM, would be used only as evidence in cases of dispute.Footnote 77 Here, Baida considers that physical documents are more difficult to tamper with than digital versions. This disposition also appears useful in convincing the Moroccan ministries that are unaccustomed to keeping organized archives to separate them from their records. Similarly to the case with colonial archives, though on different grounds, digitization may be considered a compromise on ownership and a way to facilitate the work of AdM in collecting records.
While all of that might seem like an interesting solution to spread costs over all ministries, it does not satisfy everyone engaged in archival work. First of all, it raises the question of the use of the digital archives by AdM. Apart from in the exceptional cases of those ministries permitted to keep physical records, the decree makes no provision for ministries to transmit digital versions. It might be imagined that they would transfer a digital copy as well, thus making easier future communication to the public through digital means, for example on an internet data-basis. However, as underlined by the Director of AdM, any such digital copies would be no more than simple copies of the records; they would not have gone through the physical and intellectual processing that archives are subjected to at AdM. Such copies would therefore still need to be processed by AdM before making them accessible to the public.Footnote 78
Another limit to digitization as a solution in negotiations with domestic ministries is the sheer cost of it. As described, digitization requires both equipment and human resources, which needs could actually hinder the processing and transfer of records by ministries to AdM.Footnote 79 That is what a French expert involved with the EU-funded project of processing the ERC archive seems to think. During my interview with him he gave examples of the difficulty and cost of digitizing records. Although he had in the past organized the digitization of records in the French department of Calvados, he acknowledged the cost of it. He referred to the cost of digitizing – although in the case he was referring to the work went very quickly because the records were already on microfilm. As he pointed out, that is mainly a cost in human resources. The cost of maintaining servers he estimates as not very high. All in all however, in my French interviewee’s opinion, digitizing is useful only for online use, whether immediately or in the future which itself depends on the status of the archive; and the cost of it might hinder ministries in their organization of archival transfers to AdM.Footnote 80
Once again, the ERC and the CNDH (Conseil National des Droits de l’Homme) have played important roles in the implementation of AdM’s plans for the transfer of administrative archives. As the report of the ERC recommended, its archives were to be processed then transferred to a proper institution for conservation. Once AdM was created, that remained to be done. Given the centrality of the ERC’s recommendation on the creation of AdM and its connection to the recommendation to process and preserve the ERC’s archives, the follow-up might seem natural. However, the ERC’s archives, which were classified by how they had been used, were not in fact dealt with for a number of years. They represented between two hundred and four hundred linear metres and were stored in dry enough rooms but in which no definitive archiving classification had been adopted. One reason for that might have been lack of interest within the CNDH, a relatively young institution with diversified skill sets, which itself moved offices during the period. The lack of interest was compensated for by the role of the Committee in charge of following the implementation of the ERC’s recommendation and, in all likelihood, by the interest of the CNDH’s director, Driss El Yazami, a central person in the CNDH’s decision-making process in archival matters. One dimension of the project was to set an example for other public institutions in Morocco and to start the process by which they transferred their records to AdM. Indeed, until then, AdM had managed to recover only a limited number of public archives, mostly from the colonial period and which had been kept in the building of the General Library with no proper archiving. It had also benefited from a number of private donations. Even so, in part because of its limited capacity mentioned above and in part because of the reluctance of ministries, it had not yet welcomed a transfer of public archives. Moreover, the time required to train and organize an archival system made things difficult. The first transfer took place in July 2017. It consisted of the archives of a jurisdiction for arbitration in charge of compensating victims of forced disappearances and arbitrary detention and Driss El Yazami described it as “emblematic.”Footnote 81 Six months later, on 9 December 2017, International Human Rights Day, when the archives of the ERC were transferred to AdM, El Yazami expressed his satisfaction on this “beautiful day.”Footnote 82 Overall, the transfers handed over together amounted to a total of 22,050 files classified in 1,480 boxes.Footnote 83
However, processing the archives had been time-consuming and costly. First of all because of the sheer number of documents requiring so many people to process them, and an enormous number of boxes – which are not cheap – to store them in ready for transfer to AdM. A great variety of documents had to be dealt with, many of them personal files of victims and their relatives, as well as judgments and official decisions and proceedings of different groups within the ERC and documents regarding the Commission’s day-to-day administration. Digitization itself posed its own problems. The job was difficult because of the variety of formats, since the archives include pictures and all sorts of different documents. An EU-funded twinning programme dedicated to the reinforcement of the CNDH’s capacities in human rights’ protection included “preparation for the archiving of the files of victims of human rights’ violations and administrative files of the Equity and reconciliation commission in the perspective of their digitization and transfer to Archives du Maroc.”Footnote 84 In the end however, with the transfer to AdM, the mission was fulfilled. Nevertheless, there is still frustration at the absence of any archival policy within the CNDH. As late as 2017 there was still no systematic organization for archiving the current work of the institutionFootnote 85 meaning that even within an organization that has set itself up to be exemplary in the processing archives and which was presided over by a proactive, archive-conscious individual, to implement systematic, daily archival practices can be exceptionally challenging.
Overall, digitization appears first as a facilitator to collecting archives from Moroccan ministries, but its high cost tends make things more difficult. The fact that the legal framework for digitization standards was set up directly in the archival policy, rather than added later, makes it a complex matter to evaluate whether difficulties with ministries, such as convincing them to transfer their archives, are directly associated with that dimension or whether they stem from other causes. Overall, for the time being it remains difficult to evaluate a process which is still in its initial stages. However, the difficulties and AdM’s responses so far show both the cost of performing modernity and the strength of a direct, confident adoption of “modern” and “international” digital standards.
Conclusion
I have explored here the role of digitization in AdM, the recently created Moroccan national archival institution. My argument has been that digitization is one of the ways in which AdM has positioned itself as an institution for the future through the discourses of the main actors involved in its creation and subsequent work and through a number of documents presenting or evaluating the institution.
I first described how the creation of AdM was connected to a narrative of modernity, through ideas of transparency, accountability and good governance, and how digital tools and digitization fit in with that narrative. I then introduced the material aspects of digitization as daily practice at AdM, showing how the adoption of digital techniques in its daily work and in international cooperation is also a way to present the institution as “modern” and future-oriented. Finally, in the last section I have examined the potential costs and difficulties of including digitization requirements for the transfer of administrative archives to AdM. Those difficulties and how AdM has addressed them demonstrate how central digitization and, more generally, the narrative of modernity are central to the definition of the institution.
But why is performing modernity so important? Why is dedication to digitization so much a part of this modern experience? This article has shown the difficulty of creating a fully digitized institution if it is resource-poor. The digital format appears both to limit costs in some instances, for example by permitting easier communication of archives or by allowing international collection without physical transfer, while also multiplying costs in other instances. But I have suggested here that the cost of digitization and of performing modernity might actually be essential to AdM’s survival and expansion as an institution. Indeed, in an environment where resources are limited that cost element might even help the institution obtain more resources. The connection to the “megarhetoric of developmental modernization” through high technology might have helped AdM’s defenders present it as an institution essential to Morocco’s future. In a context where the Moroccan state has pushed for the inclusion of both more cultural projects – with the construction in its capital Rabat of a new cultural complex including an opera house designed by internationally famous architect Zaha Hadid – and high-tech projects, it can only help a young institution associated with culture if it can present itself as modern. Whether that strategy will be successful remains to be seen, but we should note for the time being that after years of negotiation, AdM secured the construction of a new building. The building, incidentally, planned to stand in Technopolis, a recently created technological complex which includes technical, academic, media, and research and development activities. Thus the digital as an emblem of modernity could well function as a strategic resource to reinforce AdM’s legitimacy and strengthen the fledgling institution.
