No Future? Act Now to Save Tomorrow’s Yesterday

Last week marked International Archives Week (8–12 June 2026), leaving behind a question worth lingering on:  why do we remember?

Archives, alongside libraries and other heritage institutions, are essential to ensuring that there is someone to take on the (commercially) thankless task of collecting, organising, and providing access to our history. This is why they are legislated for, given legal mandates and funding, in order to fulfil a role that no-one else will.

As the International Council on Archives points out, this activity is not a nice-to-have, but rather essential to delivering on the rule of law, protecting rights, ensuring accountability, enabling memory and dialogue, and addressing injustice.

At a time of rising populism, dramatic political changes, and the risks that this brings of infringements of rights, the need to archive the present is as great as ever.

In 2026, a huge share of the documents, articles, and other forms of expression that will make up our history, tomorrow, are online. As a result, this function of collecting, organising and providing access needs to work digitally, as there is no reason at all to believe that digital is different in this respect. Archives, libraries, and others need laws that work in an online world.

Do they have such laws now? No.

Three key challenges stand in the way. The first is simply the right of archives and libraries to access works to start with. As underlined in Christophe Geiger and Justin Jütte’s report from 2024, we are not yet in a world where there is any sort of guarantee of the ability to build a collection. Instead, there is little to prevent a rightsholder from simply deciding not to sell to libraries, because they feel that there is more to be made by focusing solely on individuals.

A similar effect comes from growing moves to block web crawlers, under the argument that this is necessary in order to maintain access for humans. The problem is that this has also blocked the public interest web crawling carried out by actors like the Internet Archive. Once again, institutions with a focus on preservation and access are left unable to even build collections in the first place.

The second challenge is whether archives and libraries can pursue their missions using the best-adapted modern technologies and techniques. Traditionally, this has been guaranteed by exceptions and limitations enabling preservation and other internal uses. However, these have not kept up with the times and instead have holes that create structural weaknesses.

For example, the EU’s preservation exception is useless when it comes to content that is licensed, which is the reality for many digital materials. Its exception for library uses is not only optional but also covers only reproduction (which relates most obviously to physical copying), not communication or making available (which are more closely associated with digital uses). And it still has a dedicated terminals exception, despite there being even in 2015 a desire to explore how to permit more remote access. This is far from equipping archives and libraries with the tools needed to fulfil their missions.

Finally, libraries and archives face contract terms that limit their ability to fulfil their missions. With a strong pressure to obtain access at whatever cost, they are at risk of being left with little room for manoeuvre when faced with provisions that block key activities, such as preservation, support for education and research, or sharing between institutions.

Both a recent Institute for Information Law (IvIR) report and work by Communia underline this point, noting that even when there is a protection against the override of copyright exceptions in law, libraries may still feel under pressure to accept terms that do just this. Going beyond copyright, the imposition of liability, unfulfillable obligations and tough restrictions on access leave archives and libraries less able to fulfil their missions.

In sum, we are in a situation where the institutions that societies rely on to carry out archiving are increasingly unable to do so. With this, we are silently undermining our ability to support justice, accountability, the protection of rights and the rule of law, and memory and dialogue.

With key opportunities coming up in Europe in the next year – the European Research Area Act, the Digital Fairness Act, and planned copyright reform – there are nonetheless opportunities to do better. Find out more about what needs to be done in our Library Action Plan!

15 June 2026

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