QUESTIONS ON THE FALSE HOPE
On archiving modern Saudi history
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The issue with archiving modern Saudi history is not the
intentionality of some stakeholders to omit histories they do not
like. That is not the entire picture. Instead, one should assume
that there was a lack of specialisation within the country in
previous decades to preserve those archives.

In order to believe in intentionality, one needs to answer the
following questions.

Did Saudi Television have specialists back in the 1960s, when it
was still regional television like Jeddah TV or Riyadh TV, to
preserve their records?

Did they have well-equipped facilities to keep those films and
protect them from degrading?

And most importantly, did they even have an interest in doing such
a thing?

I was shocked to discover that the original Moon landing tapes by
NASA were lost or sold in the 1970s, since it was standard practice
to re-record and reuse these tapes. And this is NASA. So what is
the state of Saudi archives then?

Also, from my visits to the King Fahd National Library (an amazing
institution to visit if you have the chance), the issue was not
really that they did not have the materials. The issue is either
that it is not well organised, so that your search only embarrasses
the local employee, or that there is a lot of office politics and
old-fashioned thinking.

Then there is Aramco, the biggest oil company in the world, and the
institution that probably has more tools to preserve an archive
than any other in the kingdom. Unfortunately, accessing their
archive is not an easy task. In fact it might be easier to access
it partially through Georgetown University than through Aramco
itself.

In total, accessing archives, or hoping that such archives even
exist, is not a rosy road when it comes to Saudi history. I have
yet to see clear signs that Saudi national television even has
archives in good condition going back before 1981.

And my questions remain the same. Are these even being taken care
of? Have they been scanned to keep up with the latest technology?

Then came the biggest wipeout of Saudi history: the dark ages of
the internet. Between the early 2000s and 2009, forums were the
main vehicle through which Saudis expressed their thoughts and
concerns, before the age of Twitter. Most of that history is gone,
and it feels painful because it happened so fast and so suddenly.
"Once on the internet, always on the internet" is not true.

How did we manage our lives in the early 2000s? How did we date
women from other regions? How did we share our thoughts on MSN
Messenger? Maybe some of you can relate to that.

The hope that others are protecting this history, the good in it
and the bad, the memories of joy and pain, could turn out to be a
false one. Instead, we must help each other to recover what we can
through archiving.

Khalid Alshaikh, 7Z1FP
https://ge97.com/

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