Although libraries and archives are administratively placed together in Pakistan, the archives are quite distinct from libraries with regard to their functions and organisation. Archives consist of records that have been selected for preservation on grounds of their enduring cultural, historical value.

Archival records are unpublished and unique documents, which are considered primary sources of history. In contrast, library records as secondary sources largely comprise of publications in the form of books or magazines for which many identical copies exist. While there are many kinds of archives in the world, there is a limited range of archives in Pakistan, such as government archives, university archives, not-for-profit archives, and private archives.

In his novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell dwells on the importance of archives in constructing the past: "Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past. … Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon".

The modern, Western notion of the national archive as a state institution was transferred throughout the world by the colonisation of other countries by European empires. British colonial rulers in India were able to construct an Orientalist image of the Indian past, by establishing a large repository of archival information, which was collected through the colonial administration, land settlements, population census, and ethnographic surveys.

The colonial state in India was managed by civil servants who were professionally trained to rule by the pen. They set high standards of writing, collating and archiving information, which became a necessary set of skills diffused throughout the colonial bureaucracy. A store house of colonial records, Imperial Records Department, was established in 1891 at Calcutta, the seat of central government, and later it was shifted to New Delhi in 1930 as the new capital of British India. The colonial archive formed the primary template of knowledge about India which continues to shape the collective memory and national history of Pakistan.

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At the time of partition, the government of India inherited a vast infrastructure of old imperial and state archives, which were well organised with thousands of staff members, trained in the task of acquisition, preservation and conservation of archives.

The Imperial Record Department (IRD) was renamed as the National Archives of India. The share of archival records from IRD pertaining to Pakistan was not transferred by the Indian government and Pakistan was left with colonial records which were housed in the archives of Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar and Quetta.

To fill the archival void in our collection pertaining to the British colonial period, a leading bureaucrat in the Cabinet Division in 1974, Hassan Zaheer, upgraded National Documentation Wing, primarily responsible for acquisition and preservation of records of the State Document as National Documentation Center (NDC), Islamabad, by purchasing microfilm copies of records, from then India Office Library and later British Library.

Over a period of 33 years, the NDC has built up a sizeable collection of records and has become the largest repository of primary source material in Pakistan on colonial and nationalist history, comprising over 27 million pages of documents on microfilms, acquired either from the local sources or from abroad.

One of the central repositories of public records is National Archives of Pakistan (NAP) which took birth after the partition when a Directorate of Archives and Libraries was created in 1951 in Karachi with the records of newly formed government of Pakistan.

Without the records of preceding colonial administration, which were held up at the Imperial Records Department in New Delhi after the partition in 1947, the National Archives of Pakistan was hardly worthy of its name. With the efforts of historians at the Karachi University, the records of the founding political party of the country, the Pakistan Muslim League, were accessed and conserved by the NAP in the 1960s.

With the shifting of capital to Islamabad, the NAP was shifted to the newly established Secretariat buildings and began to grow with the departmental records of the Pakistani bureaucracy. The mission of NAP is "to preserve public and private records, having bearing on the history, culture and heritage of Pakistan and to make them available to the researchers on demand and pass on to the posterity".

According to its stated mission, one of the critical services to be provided by NAP for national development is to facilitate "evolution of evidence-based governance in Pakistan". However, public apathy towards creation of records and bureaucratic indifference to the record management is hampering the growth of state archives in Pakistan.

Despite the existence of the National Archives Act 1993 and the Archives Material (Preservation and Export Control) Act 1975, which makes it mandatory to government to send all public records to NAP within 20 years of their creation, the government ministries have been lax in transferring documents to NAP and the violation of the rule is the norm rather than exception.

Pakistani state has to understand the importance of efficient record keeping -- the sine qua non of the national development. The records management can increase effectiveness of government departments and agencies not only in legal, judicial and revenue administration but also public service institutions, such as hospitals, educational institutions, public utilities.

Although a number of leading international organisations, such as UNESCO and the International Council on Archives (ICA), have stressed the importance of archival development for administrative improvement in the functioning of the state, there is a marked tendency to regard archives as purely cultural and historical institution.

International agencies, such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), as well as national agencies like USAID and private foundations, all of which expend large sums for technical assistance to Pakistan, have not for the most part considered archives an area for profitable investment. This attitude has been reinforced by the failure of Pakistan to recognise the value of records management and archives to national development.

Archives in Pakistan have always been given a low priority in national development planning and funding, being seen as a matter of history and the past, rather than the present.

Like any other archives in the world, archives in Pakistan are as much places of knowledge, as the sites of power. Archives at once protect and preserve records, legitimise and sanctify certain documents while negating and destroying others. This phenomenon is amply reflected in Pakistan’s state selected indifference to the collection and storage of archival records in Pakistan.

Whereas records of the state icons of the elite, nationalist and ideological history are collected, preserved and made accessible for public consumption by the state archives, there is fragmentary record of the people’s histories, and the working class movements, leading to gaps in our knowledge of historical events that lie outside the fold of state authorised histories.

In his book, Archive Fever, French philosopher Jacques Derrida dwells on the relationship between archives and democracy, "There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratisation can always be measured by … access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation."

It is essential for the democratic freedom of Pakistani society to preserve documentation of the past, in the form of paper records, photograph, video or audio so to prevent a historical amnesia among its succeeding generation, and to ensure an authentic record of past events that will serve as a corrective to false notions of history. This is why archives are so important -- not only to historians, but to all citizens to separate fact from fiction, history from mythology and truth from propaganda.

Over the past fifteen years, international archives have made millions of primary source documents available on the Web. The availability of online primary sources precipitated a fundamental transformation in the nature and function of archives. For Pakistan, the challenge is in digital transformation of records which are on paper or in microfilm to reach out to the generation of digital natives with a huge appetite and aptitude for the digital world.

However, Pakistani state and society is missing to capitalise on the limitless possibilities that digital technology offers. Online access to digitised collection of objects, images, and records in the archives can pave way for democratising knowledge, enhancing the capacity of citizens to know their past and extending the reach of archives to those who cannot physically reach there.

Pakistani archives can make use of the potential of social media for connection. Digital technology can exponentially increases the capacity of individuals to engage with archival collections as have been proven by the track records of world’s best archives.