Parliament denies reports that precious documents may have been lost in fire

Parliament has denied reports that millions of precious documents may have been lost in the fire as a result of its botched digitisation project.

GroundUp reported on Friday that a 4 January report to the Parliament Library warned that “the entire collection in the stores at the National Assembly were affected by the fire, and may be lost. These stores contain South Africa’s entire pre-1994 parliamentary records.”

“The 4 January report offers some mitigation: these records have been digitised. But this is not accurate,” it said.

In responses to the publication, parliament said the digitisation project was “closed” in September 2017, and that scanners had been purchased as part of the overall Library Upgrade Project.

“Internal staff were trained on digitisation including quality assurance. This provided an opportunity for the work to be absorbed to line function and be part of the ongoing work of the Library,” said parliament.

“Library statistics confirmed that 95.35% of digitised materials were delivered to Parliament.

“Scanned materials that were assessed with an error rate of above the 10% threshold were returned to the service provider for re-scanning.”

ALSO READ: MPs told about security upgrade failures leading up to Parliament fire

Parliament said since the fire outbreak, it had been consistent in its communication that historical documents were digitised and backup of critical parliamentary documents made.

“Parliament has no reason to hide the details of damage caused by the fire, which is yet to be assessed fully. If these historical documents were destroyed in the fire …we would have said so,” said parliament in a statement on Friday.

“Chapter 1 of the Press Code of Ethics and Conduct for South African Print and Online Media states clearly that the media shall ‘take care to report news truthfully, accurately and fairly; and ‘present news in context and a balanced manner, without any intentional or negligent departure from the facts whether by distortion, exaggeration or misrepresentation, material omissions, or summarisation.”

Parliament said it would take the matter to the Ombudsman.