Australian Society of Archivists

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Paul Macpherson
Theory, Standards and implicit Assumptions: Public Access to Post current Government Records
Despite records continuum thinking explicitly defining recordkeeping as capturing, maintaining and delivering authentic and reliable evidence transactions over space and time, some continuum theorists have implicitly seen a disjunction between the business use of records and the cultural use of archives. This is reflected in records standards. If recordkeeping is a continuum, either public access must be part of the entire recordkeeping process and be encompassed in the standards deriving from the theory, or the theory should explicitly exclude public access to post current records from the purview of recordkeeping and by extension from recordkeeping standards. This paper argues for the former.

Esther Robinson
Archives in the Classroom: The Development and Evaluation of National Archives Teachers' Resources
This article examines the mutually beneficial relationship between an audience of teachers and the National Archives of Australia. The author explains why the Archives selected this audience to target, how an understanding of this sector’s needs influenced the products which the Archives developed and the role of evaluation in each project. She particular!y focuses on the development and evaluation of two teachers' resource kits demonstrating bow the evaluation of one kit influenced the development of the other.

Ray Edmondson
A Case of Mistaken Identity: Governance, Guardianship and the ScreenSound Saga
This article explores some issues of perception, presentation, governance and guardianship for cultural institutions, and in particular the crucial importance of a custodial institution’ name, by using the National Film and Sound Archive experience as a case study which illustrates the risks of radical renaming. For consistency, I refer to the institution 1hroughout by the name adopted in 1984 ‑ and by its diminutives, NFSA or the Archive. Anything else would be too confusing. In particular it considers:
implications of the change for the dependent and politically vulnerable status of the Archive, hence the need for legislation to give it an independent legal identity;
the possible covert significance of change from a name appropriate to national institutions to one which has the ring of a commercial brand, and whether this signals future subordination of ifs archival and research functions to those of commercial exploitation, and
the unsatisfactory process of change, especially the paucity of consultation and the absence of transparency and accountability.
Other dimensions apart, these are professional issues with implications for all custodial institutions. Further, the national and international stature of the NFSA as an exemplar means as policy decisions are influential so they merit study and scrutiny.

Gabrielle Hyslop
For Many Audiences: Developing Public Programs at the National Archives of Australia
In this article I explore the role of public programs at the National Archives of Australia in order to highlight key issues facing archives as we endeavour to make our organisations and our collections more accessible to wider audiences. Public programs, which include exhibitions, education and events programs, publications and websites, fulfil an educational purpose that goes beyond the marketing of archival institutions. Our products contribute to the education of the population so that they understand their history, their society and their role as citizens in a democracy. I argue that good public programs must focus on the audience and speak to them in entertaining, engaging and challenging ways.

Ian Sutherland
A Move Too Far? The Relocation of the Adelaide Office of the National Archives of Australia
This article looks at the public consultation that occurred leading up to the relocation of the Adelaide Office of the National Archives.

Paul Turnbull
Engaging with History Complexity in the Virtual Environment: The South Seas Project
The South Seas Project is a joint research venture between the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, James Cook University and the National Library of Australia. It is focused on the creation of a web-based hypermedia edition of the journals and images documenting Cook’s momentous first Pacific voyage (1768‑71), together with annotations and essays in various media. The creation of such a complex artifact presents various intellectual conceptual and technical challenges. In this paper, I explore what seem to me some of the more important of these challenges, notably those relating to the cross-cultural nature of Australian and Pacific history. I also reflect on the problems associated with developing a digital information management and publication system that historians can use to engage in the critical practices they have traditionally undertaken and championed through the medium of print-based communication.

 

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