Archiving represents one side of the coin, whose inseparable other side is the principle of destruction and non-preservation of data. Archiving can never do without the complementary principle of data reduction.

In his otherwise remarkable reflections, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger recently built one of the points of his account on the thesis that, while during most of the history of civilisation, remembering was significantly more expensive and laborious than forgetting, the latter of the two being completely predominant, during the evolution of civilisation from the invention of the printing press, through the industrial to the digital revolution, remembering gradually became cheaper and easier, and today, for the first time in history, remembering and preserving information is cheaper and easier than forgetting, not preserving, deleting.Footnote 1 At the same time, he maintains that digital data preservation is now cheaper than analogue preservation.Footnote 2 In his analyses, however, Mayer-Schönberger omitted many crucial points and criteria that come into play. He completely ignored, among other things, the phenomenon of data leaks, hacker attacks, deliberate breaches of data protection, including the financial costs associated with such protection and, in some cases, the payment of extortion demands. He paid little attention to archiving and, along with that, he completely ignored the fact that a large part of the documentation of public institutions, which are subject to archiving obligations in the public interest, is still created in analogue form, and it is not within the financial capacities of any state to carry out a mass conversion of the entire corpus of such materials into digital form. At the same time, no state is capable of archiving the created records in their entirety. Moreover, such a step would be counterproductive, as it would surround that very small part of valuable data with information ballast, and as a result, make it very difficult and in many cases impossible to retrieve valuable information in the future. Mayer-Schönberger’s “digital remembering” represents and will represent only a part of the memory and source wealth of human civilisation.

The archival sector and archiving in the public interest represent a space where, paradoxically, the most massive reduction of public records and data produced mainly by public bodies takes place. At the same time, it is one of the most important areas where personal data are processed. Archival management of personal data has two specific features:

  1. 1.

    Personal data are preserved and managed by archives for a very long time. If we define personal data in the narrow sense of the legislation regulating the protection and processing of personal data, which usually relates personal data to living individuals, then the archives actually manage personal data throughout their entire existence. The reason is simple: To date, almost 100% of material preserved in both public and private archives is archived permanently.

  2. 2.

    This is related to the second formative feature of archival processing of personal data: During the long-term and to this day intentional permanent preservation of archived materials, over time, as archives and the records they keep “age” and become older, a phenomenon occurs that can be described on some level as the “depersonalisation” of archival records in proportion to the death of those concerned in the records. As it happens, the oldest archives date back to the Ancient Orient, where the oldest roots of archiving develop with the beginnings of the earliest libraries. In the Ancient Orient, there was no real difference between libraries and archives, just as there was no difference between a literary work and a record at that time.Footnote 3 For example, a significant part of the preserved clay tablets from the Library of Ashurbanipal established in one of the largest cities in the Assyrian Empire, the ancient city of Niniveh in the seventh century BC, contains records closely related to the actions of the Mesopotamian government and consistent in content to the content of today’s archives.Footnote 4

Archiving oscillates between the proverbial millstones of two in many respects opposing public interests and the usually constitutionally guaranteed rights it is supposed to defend and fulfil: On the one hand, archives are supposed to be a tool for opening access to information, enabling study and research, but also for creating a multi-layered memory, beginning with the memory of the individual, the memory of the family, going all the way to the memory of the whole society and civilisation. On the other hand, archives are one of the major actors in the field of reducing the enormous and permanently unpreservable amount of data and records created especially after 1945. In addition, they are an important element in the protection of an individual against various threats in the form of misuse of their personal and sensitive data, in the field of personality and privacy protection.

This tension is reflected in yet another paradox of archiving: The preservation of data and records, including long-term/permanent archiving, is always determined and driven in its deepest foundations by its counterpart—that is, by non-preservation and destruction. The vast majority of records and data must necessarily be destroyed in order to preserve the absolute minimum for a longer period of time—sometimes with the vision of permanent archiving. The main challenge of the existing records management and archiving is how to limit the quantity of records and data stored so that they can be preserved or archived in the long term, given the limited financial, staffing, and storage capacities.

In the future, however, records management and archiving face yet another and probably much more challenging issue in dealing with the significantly increasing risk of data misuse, which always comes hand in hand with data and records. This risk was already pointed out 20 years ago by Terry Cook in a methodological study prepared for UNESCO on the subject of archival appraisal and selection of records containing personal data.Footnote 5 It is not inconceivable and, in my opinion, it is extremely likely that this perspective will soon outweigh the very problem of the quantity of records.

In this respect, the following three chapters will present an argument for the main thesis and conclusion that records management and, for the purpose of our research, archives and archiving in particular should, among other forms of testing, also carry out public interest and proportionality testing to determine on the one hand the value (historical, social, archival, etc.) of the record for long-term or permanent archiving, and on the other hand, assess the sensitivity of the data contained in the records together with the risk of misuse of such data intended for transfer to permanent archiving.

This does not mean, however, that records management and archiving are always faced with a Sophie’s Choice—having to choose between the “life” and “death” of a record or the personal data it contains, when, for example, a decision is made to irreversibly anonymise personal data. In addition to data destruction and anonymisation, there are other ways to preserve personal data, at least in some cases, that at the same time allow us to bridge the phase of their high sensitivity and substantial risk potentially endangering the data holder, by, for example, hermetically sealing them for a certain period of time. These methods and some other options will be discussed further below.

All these cases consider the means of data minimisation in one way or another. Not strictly in the sense of the European GDPR regulation that regards minimisation solely as the irreversible destruction of this data, but we see minimisation in a broad sense, which also includes restrictions on access to records and information, but also, for example, restrictions on the period of their preservation.

Archiving is currently undergoing a significant transformation: The basic and practically only motivation for legal archival destruction after 1945 was the necessity to reduce the dramatically increasing volume of records created since World War II. Archiving then understood that the pre-war idea of one of the classics of archival theory, Hilary Jenkinson, was unsustainable; the theory claimed that an archivist should preserve the archives exactly as received from the creator without reducing any records of his own volition. According to Jenkinson, this was the only way for the archive to retain its character of being an impartial witness, a sole account of the activities of a particular institution. Archival appraisal of records in terms of their possible historical significance was something Jenkinson would prefer to omit altogether. Records should be preserved primarily for the value they had during their active use. If anyone at all should evaluate records and possibly designate some for discarding, it should be the creator, not the archivist at the archive where the records should eventually be transferred.Footnote 6

The sharp increase in the volume of records created after 1945 thus anticipated a phenomenon that contemporary society has and will continue to face—big data. According to one statistic, the volume of data and information created, captured, copied, and consumed globally (most of it already digital) has increased more than tenfold in the last decade; in 2020 it is estimated at 59 zettabytes compared to 2011 when the estimate was 5 zettabytes.Footnote 7 The same statistics then projects a total volume of 149 zettabytes for 2024, that is, in four years the volume of these data would double again (for 2021 the volume of 74 zettabytes was estimated). Another fact shall also be taken into account—the ever-increasing percentage of replicated and non-unique data in relation to unique data. The cited research has arrived at a rough estimate of 1:9 (unique data: replicated data) for 2020, with the trend slowly moving towards less unique and more replicated data; in 2024 the estimate of this ratio is 1:10.

However, it is not only the current era of “big data” that understands the risks and impossibility of processing and longer-term storage of all or the majority of the created information. Document management and archiving saw soon after 1945 that for capacity reasons alone it was impossible to archive everything or almost everything and that massive reductions in the created records were needed in order to reduce their unsustainable volume. This purpose persists to this day. However, alongside this—which brings us to the aforementioned basal transformation—there are some very clear indications that it will be joined by yet another purpose or motivation: Data minimisation and the destruction of records, and probably in some cases even the destruction (or irreversible anonymisation) of records already stored in the archives will henceforth be substantially motivated also by the protection of people, their personality rights, privacy, and data.

The following chapters will demonstrate the premise that archives will (be forced to) take a much more detailed look at the issue of personality and privacy protection in the future, not only from the perspective of what data already stored in archives should be anonymised/pseudonymised when and how, what data should be available to which researchers and in which situations, but also in terms of what data to transfer to the archives for archiving and what data to destroy. In this respect, archiving and archival science should in the near future develop a methodology of archival appraisal that takes into account this aspect of reducing and minimising the data stored in archives and limiting their storage in order to protect the personality and privacy of the persons concerned in the records and archives.

I will analyse the issue of data protection, especially personal data, protection of personality rights and privacy in the archival sector in view of the role played by the process of reduction and minimisation of data that are, should, or should not be preserved. In doing so, I will pinpoint some specific examples of misuse of personal data that were stored either in still living records management or already archived. In the analysis of the process of reduction and minimisation of data maintained in archives, I will also look at the anonymisation and pseudonymisation of data that are either already stored or aspire to be archived in the future.

6.1 Records Archiving as a Tool of Personal Data, Personality, and Privacy Protection

Even though any archiving of (personal) data can itself be interpreted eo ipso as a security risk and a threat of potential future misuse, archives and archiving also act as a protector of data and rights, including personality rights and privacy. After all, since the earliest ancient archives, the motivation for the protection of rights and the possibility of their potential future claim, application, and enforcement has been at the heart of archives. In his classic work on archival history, Ernst Posner detected several basic groups that come into play when creating records from ancient times to the present day; he called them “constants in record creation”.Footnote 8 In the vast majority of cases, the motivation for their creation lies in the very foundations of the exercise of rights and claims for which the archived records were intended to serve as evidence. Among these constants, Posner highlighted particularly those records serving as testimony and evidence of past administrative actions, financial and other accounting materials used by the ruler or another owner for the administration of their estates, tax records, records serving the civil registry for military purposes, forced labour, various payments and levies, and notarial records.

These intentions have persisted to a significant extent through the medieval period to the present day. Particularly in the twentieth century, the content of archives began to consist to a greater extent of other material serving also personality rights and their protection, although the original purpose of their creation was often different, sometimes even directly opposite. A prime example can be found in court records and records created by prosecutors, security services and other entities, especially public authorities, in countries that underwent a phase of totalitarianism and subsequent transition to democracy in their modern history. This is specifically the case of prosecution and court investigative files in which citizens were unjustly prosecuted and sentenced in politically motivated trials during the period of Nazi or Communist totalitarianism, in which their rights, including personality rights, were fundamentally damaged; these files usually became a direct part of and an essential piece of evidence in rehabilitation proceedings in which the damaged rights, including personality rights, were rectified as far as possible. At the same time, these rehabilitation files, as well as the original court files of courts where political trials took place, are determined for permanent archiving in their entiretyFootnote 9; on the other hand, the vast majority of other agendas of prosecution authorities and courts undergo archival selection and only a very small percentage is maintained and the absolute majority (about 90–95%) is designated for destruction.

The situation is similar for security forces materials, especially those created by the secret police and intelligence services of the totalitarian period. In this case again, records that represent one of the most significant violations of citizen’s rights ever, after the fall of totalitarianism, become one of the key sources for the rehabilitation and satisfaction of victims of injustice. For example, in the case of the Stasi Records Archive, the former East German State Security (Stasi-Unterlagen-Archiv), from the beginning of its existence in 1990 to 31 December 2020, an astonishing 7,353,885 requests were addressed to the archive for consultation or access to its archival records and data, of which 3,349,609 were made by citizens.Footnote 10 This represents an average of approximately 240,000 applications per calendar year. Nearly half of them were requests from individual citizens, whose interest was usually motivated by the desire to find out whether and, if so, how the Stasi and the state were interested in them and collected information about them, and how their rights were violated by the public authorities. Official requests for consultation served to a large extent to correct and atone for injustices and violations of rights. Purely research- or education-oriented interest represents an absolute minimum of the total number of requests to the Stasi Records Archive (in recent years, with one exception, it has been below 1000 requests per year). It should also be taken into account that the archive manages a total of 111 linear kilometres of archival materials, of which 51 kilometres were archived and processed by the Stasi itself, another 60 kilometres were found disorganised in the Stasi offices after the fall of the East German totalitarian regime. To date, the Stasi Records Archive has managed to process and open 94% of these materials to research interest.

The fact that the preservation and archiving of records can serve to protect various rights has also been demonstrated in some specific cases. The year 1997 saw the flare-up of the case of the then Union Bank of Switzerland, now UBS, who deliberately destroyed records proving ownership of property stolen by the Nazis from Holocaust victims, lists of mortgaged buildings, general ledgers, personal bank accounts, including Swiss accounts of Holocaust victims.Footnote 11 The case was triggered by a security guard at the bank who happened to come across these materials in the bins in which records designated for destruction were collected. He secretly removed some of this material and made the case public. It was subsequently picked up by the world press. UBS later admitted that its employees had accidentally destroyed some materials from the Nazi period that could provide evidence regarding the affairs and property of Holocaust victims. The bank thus violated an express prohibition mandated by the Swiss government against the destruction of such material in light of the then ongoing investigation into the collaboration of Swiss banks with the Nazis, and their assistance in legalising the stolen wealth of Nazi victims. The employee in question, Christoph Meili, who brought the case of unauthorised destruction to the public, was fired from UBS and, in addition, criminally investigated for violating banking secrecy. Meili subsequently left Switzerland under pressure from threats made by neo-Nazi groupsFootnote 12 and became the first-ever Swiss political asylum-seeker in the USA. As a result of public pressure, the bank suspended its chief archivist, Erwin Haggenmueller,Footnote 13 who had allegedly made the decision to shred the records in question and who was thus blamed in an internal UBS investigation.

Another notable example is the so-called fichiers juifs, a registration file of Jews living France at the time of the occupation, which I will discuss in more detail in Chap. 7, and which the French Minister of the Interior decided to destroy shortly after the liberation of France from Nazi rule, in order to protect people of Jewish origin and guarantee their rights; he then reversed his decision and decided to preserve the files for the same reason, especially for the purposes of compensation.

However, the preservation of records and archiving as a tool for the protection of personality rights is also demonstrated in a number of other cases. Chapter 4, discusses several cases related to child sexual abuse. In the case of the German Odenwaldschule, the archive consulted with the relevant prosecutor’s office and decided on the premature transfer of the material for preservation and possibly permanent archiving of some of its parts, arguing that both the preservation of the records and the guarantee of proper management of the personal data in them, including restrictions on access, are crucial for the investigation of the entire case and the protection of the personal data and rights of those affected. The need was intensified by the fact that there had previously been unauthorised data leaks from these records.

Another form of protection of rights, including personality rights, is demonstrated in the same chapter that analyses the cases of some Roman Catholic diocesan “secret archives” relating to cases of child sexual abuse by clergy and church leaders. In this case, the crucial moment is the Church’s deliberate and unauthorised destruction of the records testifying to secret internal investigation into the cases of sexual abuse, especially of children. Needless to say, the risk of illegal destruction of records resulting in violation of the rights of the victims is not solely limited to the Church. The Australian Heiner Case, also known as “Shreddergate”, has become one of the most debated cases of illegal records destruction in Australia.Footnote 14 In 1989, a retired Queensland stipendiary magistrate, Noel Heiner, launched an investigation into allegations of sexual abuse at the government-run John Oxley Youth Detention Centre in Brisbane, Australia. Heiner did not complete the investigation and forwarded the file he had been working on to the Queensland Department of Family Services and Aboriginal and Islander Affairs. The Department was later questioned about this file by Kevin Lindeberg and attorney Ian Berry. It turned out the file had been destroyed, not at a point prior to Lindberg’s request, but later, when it was apparent to the then Queensland government under Wayne Goss that Heiner’s file was being sought as evidence for the anticipated trial in the matter.Footnote 15 The government approached the state archivist at the time to give an opinion on whether the incriminating Heiner file had historical value and should be archived, but deliberately withheld the fact that the file would probably be requested in future court proceedings. The archivist was given 24 hours to make a decision whether to destroy the record, which was eventually the case. Lindeberg subsequently initiated a series of legal actions to prove that the destruction of the file was illegal. In the following years, special Australian Senate committees were formed to investigate the case, including the issue of the illegal destruction of Heiner’s file. In 2014, Attorney General Jarrod Bleijie finally decided to suspend the investigation into the case.Footnote 16

Not only should documentation testifying to crimes of sexual violence not be destroyed prematurely, on the contrary, it should be preserved for as long as it can potentially serve as evidence. It is also necessary to point out that many countries have been gradually extending or even abolishing the statute of limitations for such criminal offences (they do not exist, for example, in the United Kingdom or in the Netherlands, where all statutes of limitations for serious sexual abuse offences were abolished in 2013 and the minimum prison sentence is eight years). If this trend continues, the material in question should be archived permanently, or the retention periods for such records should be extended (for more detail see Chap. 4).

The problem in these and similar cases lies in the detection of the relevant records, as information about the commission of these crimes often comes to light only after a long delay and the records can thus be destroyed in the meantime. However, this was not the case in the destruction of Heiner’s investigation file, as the responsible authorities were well aware that the file concerned child sexual abuse and that it was to become an important piece of evidence in an anticipated trial.

Although archiving is one of the important tools for the protection of rights, including personality rights, data protection, and privacy, let us now concentrate on the main topic of the following chapters, which is quite the opposite; it concerns the risks associated with the preservation and archiving of personal data, their minimisation and storage limitation as a tool for the protection of personality rights and privacy and in relation to archives and archiving.

6.2 Archival Inflation and the Reduction of Records, Data, and Archives

It may sound like heresy, especially from the point of view of archiving, yet the only way to protect certain data (including personal data) is simply not to maintain them, that is, to destroy them. Traditionally, the primary interest of archives and archivists tends to go in the opposite direction that is towards records and data preservation. In the 1980s, the famous French historian, Pierre Nora, claimed that the contemporary climate was ruled by a “religion of preservation” (“réligion conservatrice”) and “archival production” (“productivisme archivistique”).Footnote 17 In his view, contemporary society suffered from an “obsession to preserve”. However, today archivists—at least those who deal with modern records from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—know that in addition to the art of preservation, the art of destruction is just as necessary for archival science.

From a philosophical perspective, this phenomenon was aptly described by Jacques Derrida in the 1990s in his now classic work of archival theory; he distinguished two basic concepts that drive archiving, which he tried to elaborate using the categories of Freud’s psychoanalysis. The first is the “destruction drive” or, as Derrida writes, “the aggressive and destructive drive” (“pulsion de destruction”, “pulsion d’agression et de destruction”), the drive of “radical destruction” (“effacement radical”) corresponding to the “death drive” (“pulsion de mort”).Footnote 18 The second is the conservation drive (“désir d’archive”; “pulsion de conservation”; “pulsion d’archive”) corresponding to the pleasure principle. Derrida characterises this drive as the archive desire or fever (“mal d’archive”), which also gave name to his entire book.Footnote 19

The need to destroy the absolute majority of created records saw a radical increase especially after 1945, and this trend has obviously continued in recent decades and years. The development can also be clearly demonstrated by the statistical figures and the methodological recommendations based on them. In 1983, the United Nations noted that the central or national archives of countries from different parts of the world that participated in the empirical survey maintain between 5% and 40% of the total created documentation (Table 6.1).Footnote 20 For the past several years, the UN has recommended the archiving of approximately 5–10% of records (Table 6.1).Footnote 21 The British National Archives estimate the number of archived records to be only 5%Footnote 22 and this number—as illustrated—corresponds to the amount of material preserved in the State Regional Archives in Prague, one of the regional state archives in the Czech Republic.Footnote 23 However, the US National Archives—NARA, National Archives and Records Administration, preserves only 1–3% of the records created by the US federal government (Table 6.1).Footnote 24

Table 6.1 Percentage of archives preserved in relation to records destroyed
Full size table

This growing need to destroy is mirrored by the rapidly increasing volume of archived records (Table 6.2). No other period had ever preserved so much official material. Let us now take a look at two striking examples. In 1985, the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) managed an impressive 416 linear kilometres of archival records (throughout this study, I will round up to the nearest linear kilometre).Footnote 25 Twenty-eight years later, at the end of 2013, the number had grown to a breath-taking 1308 linear kilometres.Footnote 26 In just under 30 years, its volume had more than tripled. Even more incredible is the increase in the volume of a specific part of French “regional archives” (i.e., the archives of French regions constituting a special level of French public administration established during the second half of the twentieth century), which will be further discussed below, and which had quadrupled (sic!) in volume in just 10 years between 2006 and 2015, growing cumulatively by nearly 300% (in this review, I will always compare the increase in archival volume to its increase in the first year of the period under review and will do so in the case of multi-annual cumulative calculations as well). Their volume then increased from 32 linear kilometres to 127 kilometres (Table 6.2)!

Table 6.2 Increase in the volume of archival material in selected archives in recent decades
Full size table

If Daniel Doležal was really seriously taken aback by the increase in the linear metres of archival materials stored in archives in the Czech Republic—between 2002 and the beginning of 2015 the increase was an alarming 27.6%, and this without taking into account digital archives,Footnote 27—then the three times faster rate of growth in the volume of archival material in the US National Archives would take his breath away, not to mention the specific situation of French regional archives, where the rate of growth is ten times greater than the summary figures for Czech archives. The approximate annual increase of less than 2% in the volume of archival records in Czech archives is more than overshadowed by the almost 8% (7.7% to be exact—all percentages in this text are rounded to the nearest tenth) average annual increase in the volume of archives in the US National Archives and falls massively behind the almost 30% average annual increase in the volume of French regional archives.

The rate of increase in the volume of archives in the US National Archives, but also in Czech archives, is indeed—to put it very mildly—striking and calls for a deeper reflection. The figures prompted me to research what the situation is in other archives in some of the countries with the most advanced archival systems when it comes to these parameters. The results are quite remarkable.

My statistical survey included selected archives from the USA, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Czech Republic. The differences between the individual archives and countries are considerable. Unfortunately, publicly available sources do not always provide exactly comparable data for the same time period. I am therefore compelled to refer to the increases in the volume of archival material over the last 10 or 15 years or so, with slight variations.

By far the largest increase in the volume of archives has been recorded by a very specific type of French public archives, the so-called regional archives (archives régionales), that is, archives preserving materials created by the relatively recently established new level of local government in France—the regions. The French regions, however, date their administrative origins in the modern era back to 1963 or 1964, but it was not until 1982 that they acquired the status of a genuine local authority with their own powers, which happened in the context of the then radical process of the decentralisation of public administration in France. French regional archives are therefore very young institutions with a relatively recent “birth date”, and that is also one of the reasons for the high increase in their volume.

The French regional archives are followed—apart from the specific situation of the German Federal Archives, which will be discussed later—by the US National Archives, with an average annual increase of 7.7% in the period 1985–2013. The third position on my list of selected archives is held by the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv). First, it is worth noting the increase in the volume of the archive over the long time horizon of 41 years between 1977 and 2018. It should not go unnoticed that West and East Germany unified during this time and the figure is thus slightly distorted. While in 1977 the West German Bundesarchiv held 72 kilometres of archival material,Footnote 28 in 2018 it was already 420 kilometres for the whole of Germany.Footnote 29 In 41 years the archive grew by 348 kilometres of records, a cumulative increase of 483%! This means an average annual growth rate of 11%! What is more, this figure does not include the increase in digital records. Recent acquisitions of archival material in the German Bundesarchiv show an average annual increase of 5% between 2012 and 2018. While in 2012 the Federal Archives held 323 kilometres of archival records,Footnote 30 in 2018 it was, as mentioned, 420 kilometres, 97 kilometres, that is 30% more!

The National Archives of Canada (Library and Archives Canada) increased its archival holdings by 42.2% (!) between 2005 and 2015, an average of 4.2% per calendar year (Table 6.2).Footnote 31 Just as a matter of interest, I would like to add that in 2005 this archive (not including the library holdings of the part of this archive connected with the library) managed 169 kilometres of archival material, of which 46 kilometres were of private-law provenance. In 2015, the total was already 241 kilometres of archives, an increase of 72 linear kilometres in just 10 years!

Lower figures can be seen, for example, in the case of summary data for the whole of archives in the Czech Republic, where, the average increase in the volume of archives in recent years has been approximately 2% per year (Table 6.2), and a similar figure applies to the French departmental archives responsible for the management of archives of departmental provenance as one of the levels of public administration in France (Table 6.2). Between 2006 and 2019, the French departmental archives saw a 2% annual increase in total average volume.Footnote 32 To use specific numbers, this represents an increase of 602 kilometres in the total volume of French departmental archives over 14 years, with a total of 2713 kilometres of archives stored at the end of 2019.Footnote 33 The 2% growth also applies to the last five years (2014–2019).

However, we also come across archives that are not afraid to close the floodgates on the stream of new archival material for permanent storage in a more significant way. For example, one of Germany’s archives, Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg (State Archives of Baden-Württemberg), which increased its volume by an average of 1.68% between 2006 and 2019 and grew by 31.5 kilometres to a total of 165 kilometres (Table 6.2), is below the annual growth rate of 2%.Footnote 34 But the French National Archives goes much further; in the five-year period of 2015–2019, the increase was only 1.25% per year (Table 6.2). The total number went from an initial 349 kilometresFootnote 35 of archival records at the beginning of 2015 to 370 kilometres at the end of 2019.Footnote 36 However, concentrating on the increase in the volume of archival material purely in 2019, the number gets even lower. The new addition (not including digital archives) amounted to 2.6 kilometres,Footnote 37 an increase of only 0.7% of paper records in relation to the total volume of the maintained archives (Table 6.2)!

Finally, the archive growing at the slowest pace in the sample I selected, is the British National Archives. In the decade between 2011 and 2020, its volume grew by an average of only 0.5% (Table 6.2)!Footnote 38 The total volume of the UK National Archives is also relatively small relative to the size of the country and its population (since 2011, Scotland has had its own central archive, the National Records of Scotland), amounting to about 200 kilometres of archival records. It should be added, however, that the volume of archival acquisitions at the British National Archives has increased significantly in recent years. From 2011 to 2020, the transfer in terms of linear metres was respectively: 373, 612, 882, 799, 898, 1492, 1663, 1343, and finally 2018. It needs to be added that electronic records are not included (Table 6.2).

However, any future increase in the volume and percentage of records destroyed within the archival appraisal procedures in relation to preserved material should not occur only due to the long-term unsustainable increase in the volume of archival material, but also, to no lesser extent, due to the protection of the personality, privacy, and personal data of those concerned in such material. I shall defend this argument in the text below.