Conserving Belize’s Patrimony
The Archives Department receives and conserves documents and audiovisual records that are produced mostly by government ministries and departments. It holds custody of historic documents and newspapers dating back to the late 1700’s. The most recent piece of instrument that was placed in its care was the Declaration of Independence, which was handed over by the Speaker of the House and the Clerk of the National Assembly a couple months ago. Today News Five’s Marion Ali paid a visit to the Belize Archives and Records Service to bring you a bit about the work they do. Here’s that story.
Marion Ali, Reporting
We all remember the handing over of the Instrument of Belize’s independence, from officials of the National Assembly to the Belize Archives and Records Service. The Speaker of the House, Valerie Woods explained to News Five recently that the document had been resting in a fireproof safe in the National Assembly since independence in 1981.
Valerie Woods, Speaker of the House
“September 21st, 1981, the Instrument of Independence was handed over to the Right Honorable George Price. And then it was given to the clerk at the time, and it was stored in the safe – in a manila envelope in the safe. It’s been there ever since. It’s been there ever since. And what really has preserved it is the fact that it’s been there ever since, in a safe – a fireproof safe. So it was never handled. It was like a book. It was never opened up.”
But in order for the document to last as long as it possibly can, it needed to be housed in an environment where the temperature is constant and continuous – that is a very cool room with a dehumidifier to eliminate whatever moisture the air-conditioning produces. This is where important paper documents must be stored in order to last. When we visited today, conservator at the Belize Archives, Marvin Pook and his staff were preserving an old set of paper records dating back almost two hundred years.
Marvin Pook, Conservator, Belize Archives and Records Service
“At the moment, we’re working with some records known as court records or public meetings. They’re not that old, okay? These ones we’re working on, they go back to at least 190 years, but it’s not old. We have much older records. What’s happening here at the moment is that the public wants to access them. But because of their being so fragile, we have to close access them to the public. So what we need to do now is we need to do a preventative measure by applying a reinforcement on the edges. So we would be able to digitize them. We would be able to handle them.”
Pook explained that the lab technicians apply a special technique to preserve paper records that are acidic.
“These records, because of their mechanical condition, how they were first made, they were not made for preservation purposes; they were made for business. So a company would produce paper and then a country, an institution would purchase those papers and record their information on them. So where do they end up? Here in the archives, with historical information of British Honduras. What happens here now is that we are faced with problems. One, high content of acid in the paper. Why? Because the way how they were made because, and unfortunately, our location, we’re in the tropics, temperature changes, humidity changes. And if you don’t have an adequate place to have them stored, deterioration kicks in very fast. So the intervention we are doing is we make our own adhesive, our own glue. How? We use special chemicals, special glues that are known as Clusel or metal cellulose. It’s special for archives.”
As you just heard, there are documents far older than the Instrument of Independence that date back to when Belize was British Honduras under Colonial law. Kevin Montero shared that there are also documents dating back to around the Battle of St George’s Caye.
Marion Ali
“Do you have information dating back to that era when we had important things like the Battle of St. George’s Caye?”
Kevin Montero, Director, Belize Archives and Records Service
“Yes, we have the magistrate meetings, which are minutes of meetings that were held in the settlement at the time. So those are what we have the original records from. So every time there will be minutes, the governors and then the administrators at the time would do those recordings and then they would send it to the U.K and they would always keep a copy here. So those are some of the historical archival documents that we do have, which are the original documents we have from that period. We also have like slave registers as well.”
Pook shared that there are records at the Archives that could not be salvaged, such as those that were burnt in the Supreme Court fire of 1918 in Belize City. The Archives Department also stores personal books written by individuals and offers their service digitally as well as on personal visits to the office in Belmopan for a small fee. Marion Ali for News Five.