It was first established in 1968.In 1979, with the addition of the Oral History Department, the National Archives was renamed the National Archives and Oral History Department. National Archives of Singapore is about the history, heritage and culture of Singapore.
At the field trip we were shown around the place. the places that we visited are Archives Services, Archives Conservation Laboratory,Image Preservation Laboratory and Audio-Visual Archives and Exhibition.
Archives Services is the place where people can find information and stuff about Singapore for their projects and assignments. In other words,it is like a library. But the information there cannot be found in normal libraries since most of the things are personal documents from the government.
Archives Conservation Laboratory is a place where they preserve old papers from books or newspapers which are already destroy from insects or badly damaged to make it as good as new. This is also the place where they demostrate to us how they preserve the papers. For example the process of how preserving papers are being done.
Image Preservation Laboratory is the place where they reformat images of fragile paper records onto microfilm and digital media for effective long-term storage.
Audio-Visual Archives and Exhibition is the place where they capture and preserve the moving images and recorded sound heritage of Singapore and organizes traveling exhibitions to bring our history to Singaporeans. The video includes National Day videos from the first National Day till now and other videos that is related to Singapore’s history and culture. They also have recorded videos from Mediacorp.
In conclusion, National Archives of Singapore showed me a lot of interesting things which I am able to use in my project. The people were very friendly and are willing to tell us more about the National Archives of Singapore when we ask them questions.
