With a plan to open a public centre where Guyana’s land history will be catalogued, the Guyana Lands and Surveys Commission (GL&SC) is seeking a historian to undertake the work needed to get the process started.
“We have not done a good job in this country in keeping our registers. Countries like the Netherlands and United Kingdom have records dating back to the beginning of their history in Guyana; libraries and museums with our history! And we don’t have that! So we are now trying to have that information available to the public,” GL&SC Commissioner Trevor Benn told Stabroek News last week when contacted.
“Anybody who knows anything about land will tell you that you have to chronologically keep the history of every part of land you have, you have to know where it come from, what it was used for … and that is why you have registers,” he added.
The GL&SC is currently advertising for a historian to begin information gathering and other tasks. Details of the job portfolio can be found in an advertisement in the Sunday Stabroek of May 26th.
The ad states that the duties will include: gathering historical data from various sources, including archives, books, and artifacts, as well as analysing and interpreting historical information to determine its authenticity and significance; tracing historical developments in a particular field; engaging with the public through educational programmes and presentations, archiving or preserving materials and artifacts in museums, visitor centres, and historic sites; providing advice or guidance on historical topics and preservation issues; and writing reports, articles, and books on findings and theories.
Benn said that staff at the agency told him that when the GL&SC came into being in the early 2000s, a lot of the records were thrown away by the initial management. “That is what I was told. We are trying to recreate and to preserve those we have now as we begin collecting,” he said.
He pointed out that some of the aged paper records that the commission now has is in a poor state as they were also not stored properly.
“If you come I will show you a register from the 1800s. If we open it and talk too loudly, pieces of the pages start blowing away. So it is about preserving what we have also,” Benn said.
“People must be able to come and we tell them ‘go to that archive’ and they can get from us what they need,” he added.
Making reference to the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, Benn said that many persons would be in awe when they visit the museums and similar places in those countries and see the data logs that have been compiled on Guyana. “We don’t store our records properly man. You go to these places and if you see the information on Guyana from the 1800s. I don’t know how we will be able to get those. We might very well have to buy it back from them, but I can’t say what as yet,” he noted.
In order to educate workers at the commission about what the agency hopes to achieve and for them to develop an appreciation for the preservation of material the GL&SC is taking some of them on a study tour.
“We are going to be going on a study tour before we start our Centre of Excellence – the place where I said you can come and learn about the work we are doing, where we will train our staff and the new technology. We are going on to London and the Netherlands, Rome… these are places you have these sort of historical documents preserved and it is integrated with new technologies,” he added.
