demands of future. a central bank is a giant information processing machine. our website bears testimony to this as does our central database management system ( cdbms ). a great deal of information is available in our website, as in other central bank websites : circulars, policy statements, reports, market information, economic data and the like, the cdbms is a data warehouse already available to the public. the website is expanding almost every day by leaps and bounds. distinguished bankers, academicians, scholars and archivists would agree with me that establishing physical, administrative and intellectual control over our documentary heritage is the most challenging job because of sheer variety of media on which records are stored which includes paper, microfilms, cd's, dvd's, magnetic tapes, floppies, etc. it is a really challenging job to integrate all information within an organisation on various media and store and retrieve the information when required. at present, the rbia is preserving, storing and providing access to paper based records but in future all computer generated records would also have to be preserved and transferred to archives. in this connection it may be noted that there is pertinent need to establish systems and procedures for creation, maintenance, transfer and migration of all records of vital importance created by various offices and departments of the reserve bank of india in electronic form to be preserved for administrative, evidential and historical purposes. i have just now mentioned that professionalism is indispensable for any successful archival management programme - so are functional archival building, shelving systems and disaster management programmes. as you are aware, properly built archival buildings alone can facilitate protection of records of national importance and historical value from the vagaries of weather and fire. the reserve bank of india archives has four large size records rooms each measuring about 3, 800 square feet. the records are kept in centrally air - conditioned rooms. the building is well equipped with fire fighting equipment like smoke detectors with alarm alert system and fire extinguishers. the digital access control system is being installed in the record rooms to prevent unauthorised entry. recently, reserve bank of india archives has installed a compactus shelving system which protects records from dust and enables considerable saving of space. overall it can be said that records are kept in ambient storage conditions in order to increase their longevity. i am pleased to share with you that for proper development and to meet the challenges of future the reserve bank of india archives has chalked out future plan for 2006

the past to illuminate the future. it is reported that, as early as the 5th – 4th centuries bc, the athenians kept valuable documents in the temple of the mother of the gods, known as,'metroon '. a great number of documents are said to have been kept in the temple : treaties, laws, minutes of the assembly, statements of the political philosopher socrates in his own hand, plays of sophocles and euripides, list of victors in olympic games, and the life. in ancient india the records were engraved as edicts as well as kept in buddhist monasteries. ancient archives are usually literally cast in stone. now we etch them on microfilm. we hope that these will last as long as the stone edicts. and, perhaps, people 2000 years from now will refer to the rbi archives as a temple! but archives are not only about long term memory about history and culture. archivists are also of immediate help to their organisations in ensuring proper management and presentation of information and devising policies for systematic destruction of records that are of no value. archives see to it that the organisation keeps a corporate memory, and preserves only valuable records that become manageable, retrievable and usable. in doing so the archives help to ensure better decision making and promote proper accountability. thus, archives contribute to efficiency and economy in their own administration while nurturing the collective memory without which people, research scholars, administrators and organisations would otherwise grope in the dark of amnesia. it is the records that tell us about our past and guide us for the future. without records, past mistakes would be no longer lessons for the future. citizens would not have any source material for writing past history. indeed, without records, our sense of continuity as a people would be jeopardised. a nation must believe in three things : it must believe in the past ; it must believe in the future ; it must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people to learn from the past so to gain judgement in creating their own future. our records are created for business purposes but with passage of time these records become the documentary heritage of the bank. our heritage goes back to 1935. with our current records and those that we have inherited, we have approximately 35, 143 records in the custody of our archives. these records include files, registers, photographs, press - clippings, publications and cds. some of the important documents include letters from