PANDORA

I wonder how many of my readers are familiar with the story of Pandora?

The Wikipedia version is probably as good as they come:

"In Greek mythology, Pandora was the first woman. Each god helped create her by giving her unique gifts. Zeus ordered her creation as a punishment for mankind, in retaliation for Prometheus' having stolen fire and then giving it to humans for their use. She is most famous for carrying a jar (pithos) (or box) containing all the world's evils. She releases these evils, but closes the lid before Hope can escape."

Sexist? Well you be the judge!

There is a modern Pandora right here in Australia.

PANDORA is actually an acronym for "Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia."

PANDORA, Australia's Web Archive, is a growing collection of Australian online publications, established initially by the National Library of Australia in 1996, and now built in collaboration with nine other Australian libraries and cultural collecting organisations.

How wonderful that someone at the National Library not only had the wit to create this acronym, but also to approve it's use.

The joy does not stop here though. Associated with this archive system is something called PANDAS and acronym for "The PANDORA Digital Archiving System"

How absolutely wonderful to know that one of the cutest, but most endangered species of animal on the face of the planet is now associated with this repository.

As governments in this and other countries have moved from paper based to electronic records there have been increased risks associated with a loss of accountability as physical documents can no longer be guaranteed to remain behind as evidence of what actually happened at key points in the decision making processes of government.

I applaud the work of all those people who are still trying to ensure that public servants, governments of whatever hue are kept accountable by leaving behind some trail of their communications. Their work represents the hope for the future and like Pandora's box the contents of their repositories may well be the only hope that future generations have for being able to delve into history and so to facilitate the capacity to learn from such history.

Alas, without such work and/or without paper records - evil may well have been released into the world - just like Pandora's story.

It is moot whether government decisions are recorded accurately and then stored so that they are not capable of being the subject of retrospective revisions.

It is also moot whether there is capacity for anyone to access records that the government of the day does not wish to release - witness the recent attempts by Peter Garrett to try and access records about the decision making process concerning the Tasmanian "Gunns" decision.

Without the work of all those involved in the PANDORA and PANDAS projects I suspect that like the Panda, truth and accountability of government and of public servants are on the endangered list.