During a recent visit to Britain's National Archives, I spent time reading files produced by the Foreign Office in the early 1950s. The subject – negotiation with Americans about the balance to be struck between security needs and civil liberties while making decisions on security clearances – was fascinating. Equally fascinating, from the point of view of a researcher who learned his craft in the computer age, was the form of the documents themselves. There were relatively few, and generally concise. They took a limited number of forms – a letter, a memorandum, a short report, the minutes of a meeting. Obviously all were on paper. Some were typescript, but many were written in ink, in clear longhand script. Related documents were held together in a folder that provided, on its cover, a longhand summary of the material within. Each folder was bound with a red ribbon – the proverbial bureaucratic red tape.

Government documents had been produced and stored in much the same fashion for perhaps the preceding two centuries. The technology of production and reproduction had advanced – with the advent of the fountain pen, the typewriter, and the mimeograph duplicator – but the basic form of a government file would have been familiar to a public servant transported forward from the Foreign Office of the early 1850s.