"Archives are important because they provide evidence of activities and tell us more about individuals and institutions. They tell stories. They also increase our sense of identity and understanding of cultures. They can even ensure justice."

Archives seem like an alien concept in a country that was founded only 70 years ago. Do we as a people even know the importance of archives? It’s interesting to see what comes to mind when we think archives. As rightly pointed out, in Pakistan archives are placed with libraries in administrative terms and that’s how we imagine archives -- as libraries of sorts.

To be fair, we do know that we are not good at keeping the record safe, be it of official documents or cultural heritage or history, whether in the public sector or the private. May be it has something to do with the fact that we are a new country that was founded only 70 years ago -- the fact that we wanted a clean break from our shared heritage and wanted to redefine our past along as puritan lines as the new country, a country for the Muslims of the subcontinent.

Logistically too, as Nadeem Omar tells us, India the parent country that we separated from "inherited a vast infrastructure of old imperial and state archives" and we were left with colonial records "housed in the archives of Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar and Quetta".

Read also: Lost in archives

Since then, we did set up a National Archives of Pakistan which was obviously lacking in the pre-1947 records. In our Special Report today, we try to look at the state of our state archives as well as the efforts being made by the private sector to encourage archiving. We want to see what we have in store for our own researchers and those who are working on this region.

We also want to see how we are moving with times to shift the objects, images and records in archives to online and digital tools in order to democratise knowledge. Another thing worth looking at is if we in Pakistan are educating our people into becoming archivists. This is just the beginning of our search for archives in Pakistan. We hope to do more in many such Special Reports.