This article was downloaded by: [Queen Mary, University of London]On: 11 October 2014, At: 12:14Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Australian Academic & ResearchLibrariesPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uarl20

Improving Access for the Public to theCollection of the National Archives ofAustraliaPaul Macphersona

a Paul Macpherson is Director of Accessibility Development at theNational Archives of Australia, PO Box 7425, Canberra Mail CentreACT 2610. Email:Published online: 28 Oct 2013.

To cite this article: Paul Macpherson (2000) Improving Access for the Public to the Collection ofthe National Archives of Australia, Australian Academic & Research Libraries, 31:2, 79-90, DOI:10.1080/00048623.2000.10755118

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00048623.2000.10755118

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, ouragents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to theaccuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions andviews expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and arenot the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should notbe relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information.Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands,costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arisingdirectly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of theContent.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Improving Access for the Public to the Collection of the National Archives of Australia

PAUL MACPHERSON

ABSTRACT: Discusses the National Archives of Australia's changing views on the material it should acquire, retain and make accessible. Surveys of users have prompted reassessment of search tools and priorities for digital conversion.

This paper is based on a presentation to the University, College and Research Libraries Section of ALIA given on 24 March 2000.

U p to ten years or so ago the National Archives of Australia, under its then name of Australian Archives, was a service agency of government. It was located in the Department of Administrative

Services along with agencies responsible for things such as the government's car fleet and its real estate portfolio. Its headquarters was in one of the small office blocks along Northbourne Avenue with no sign drawing particular attention to it. The archives' focus was primarily on building and running record repositories and managing the records which departments sent to fill those repositories up. It did these things very well.

Certainly it also provided access to records which under the Archives Act were in the open period (ie were over 30 years old) and available for public access. But I think it is fair to say, without denigrating the work and personal commitment of reference archivists of the past, that in practical and strategic terms the provision of access was seen more as a statutory responsibility to be managed than as a desirable outcome, or the primary purpose for keeping large quantities of records. The needs and interests of agencies were more important than those of researchers and other public end users of archives. (Paradoxically, however, many long­term academic researchers look back on these days as an ideal from which the archives has slipped. Public use then was much lower, and favoured researchers were able to obtain support and help from reference officers more akin to that provided by research assistants.)

Over the last decade or so, and particularly over the last five years,

Paul Macpherson is Director of Accessibility Development at the National Archives of Australia, PO Box 7425, Canberra Mail Centre ACT 2610. Email: paulm@naa.gov .au

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Que

en M

ary,

Uni

vers

ity o

f L

ondo

n] a

t 12:

14 1

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

AARL, June 2000

the National Archives has changed its focus. In the words of its current publicly stated strategic directions, it is now particularly:

directing resources increasingly towards the identification, control, preservation and accessibility of higher value records, and promoting the wider accessibility and use of the archival resources of Australia.1

The priority to be given to the National Archives' cultural/heritage/ information role was underlined by its transfer to the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts where it joins the National Library, National Gallery and National Museum as the country's flagship cultural institutions.

It is further enhanced by the government's provision and refurbishment of the East Block building in the Parliamentary Triangle in Canberra as the archives' national focus. This building enables the archives to provide a wide range of exhibitions, talks and programs which invite and welcome the public in to see their archives, their records, and to enable them to see that the archives doesn't just hold dry, boring, old documents but that it has information about them, of interest to them and of use to them. The National Archives hopes and expects that this will increase when as a major celebration of the centenary of Federation a new permanent gallery will be opened in this building to show the founding documents of this country.

But although these changes reflect a new paradigm of accessibility they are somewhat incidental to the way the archives ensures that it identifies and makes accessible higher value records.

One of the main professional tasks of an archivist, some would say the critical professional skill, is to identify the value of records. Most records created in the course of government business are required for only a very short time and contain no information of long term value to anyone. Examples are files documenting the purchase of stationery or the process of staff selection committees, day to day financial transactions or staff notices, routine correspondence with beneficiaries of government programs, or multiple copies of revised procedures. These records need to be kept for as long as the creating agency has a business need for them, or as required by law, and then destroyed.

There are also of course records that are clearly required for long term evidential and accountability reasons. These are records which provide the source of the authority and machinery of government and a record of the most important activities of the Commonwealth and Commonwealth institutions; records which document the entitlements of citizens such as those which enable members of the Stolen Generation to link up with their families and communities, naturalisation records, veterans' compensation files and so on, and records which are required to protect

80

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Que

en M

ary,

Uni

vers

ity o

f L

ondo

n] a

t 12:

14 1

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

Macpherson: Improving Access

the community at large, like records locating nuclear waste dumps or longitudinal climatic records.

Then there are those records which should be kept because they provide information about Australia's culture, heritage and people which is valued by the community and which members of the community wish to use for research or, indeed, for pleasure. These are records documenting important aspects of social life, historical buildings, family history, and similar things; records which may not be needed permanently as transactional evidence or for the accountability of the government to the people, but which experience and public demand shows are used by researchers or enthusiasts and are valued by the community because of this.

The archives produces the records disposal authorities that determine which records fit into which of these categories, and it is this function of appraisal, by which the archives attempts to ensure that it retains records of long term value and that records without such value can be retained by agencies for the period they are needed for business use and then destroyed. 2

At the moment it is thought that only about 5% of the records created by the Commonwealth Government are retained for any length of time. The rest are routinely destroyed in accordance with disposal authorities. Nevertheless the archives still holds about 450 kms of records ( 450 kms is the approximate equivalent of about 4.5 billion pages or say 22.5 million books). Of this amount about 255 kms (say 2.5 billion pages or approximately 12 million books) is currently appraised as being national archives (ie as being of permanent value).3

But we know that in this collection there are records which have been over-valued and are not worthy of long term retention. This is for two reasons.

The first is because in the past, when the archives was seen as a purely service agency running repositories on behalf of the government, it took in records which had never been evaluated as well as large quantities of records which were appraised, perhaps at agency insistence, as being of long term business value. The archives no longer accept custody of such records, seeing caring for this sort of material as the responsibility of the agency whose records they are.

Secondly, it is because the sentencing of records, the task of applying the archives disposal authorities to records, tends to be done in agencies by junior, or, increasingly, by outsourced casual staff. It is understandable that such staff feel far safer in judging record values generously rather than strictly. Their natural feeling is that you are less likely to get into trouble if you keep something unnecessarily, than if you sentence it for destruction. But the long term results of continual sentencing of this sort

81

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Que

en M

ary,

Uni

vers

ity o

f L

ondo

n] a

t 12:

14 1

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

AARL, June 2000

defeat the aim of ensuring that valuable items aren't lost. The clogging of repositories with low value records, selected 'just in case' and which will never be used by anyone makes it more difficult to provide meaningful access to the higher value material.

This conclusion is not just based on anecdotal evidence of someone dipping into a box and saying 'What's this junk?' (although that does happen) but also on analysis of holdings and usage rates and by using comparisons with the holdings of other national archives as indicators. The National Archives of Australia's ratio of holdings to use and population is substantially higher than the Public Record Office in the UK or the National Archives and Records Administration in the US. In fact it holds substantially more records in absolute as well as relative terms than the PRO in London.

The archives is, however, addressing the problem. It is providing the Commonwealth with a whole suite of tools to improve recordkeeping (especially for electronic records) and including improved and revised major disposal authorities so that higher value records will in the future be much more easily identifiable. This suite of recordkeeping tools and related services, called e-Permanence, was formally launched at the end of March and is available on the archives website.4 The expectation is that it will be reflected in better quality records coming into the collection in the future.

As the other side of the coin the archives is also undertaking a program of collection review, examining all existing holdings to judge whether they should retain the value and retention status which they received in the past or whether they have been over valued.5 The evidence is clear already that this review process will result in substantial reductions in holdings.

The archives is doing more than applying new disposal authorities to unappraised records or records sentenced under outdated authorities, or just reapplying existing disposal authorities more rigorously. It is also looking at the use to researchers of the information contained in records. One example of this is by comparing information sets in various similar record series covering wartime defence personnel records and records relating to immigration and citizenship, perhaps the two groups of records most prized by genealogists.

Both are groups of records which are quite voluminous. For example: every person who served in the AIF in the First World War has a personal dossier with a substantial amount of detail about the person and his or her service. As well there are pay records for each person, war gratuity records, nominal rolls of various sorts, medal records, and many other related records. Each of these has been in the past appraised as having permanent value. Yet an analysis of what information is actually

82

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Que

en M

ary,

Uni

vers

ity o

f L

ondo

n] a

t 12:

14 1

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

Macpherson: Improving Access

contained in each series is showing that there is substantially more information in the dossiers than in the other records, and that very little is contained in any of the subsidiary records that is not also contained in the dossiers. A judgement now has to be made about the importance of that small amount of extra information. Is it worth the storage costs of many kilometres of records? Would the money currently invested in storage actually be of more benefit to those who want the information from those records if it was used to re-house the dossiers in better quality containers? Would it be more effective to use it to ensure that all of the items are entered at item level on RecordSearch, the archives item level database, and thus made easily accessible to users? Could a start perhaps be made on the digital copying of them to make them available through the archives website?

A similar situation prevails in relation to Second World War records and likewise to immigration records. Applications for immigration, shipping lists, alien registration documents, citizenship files and so on all include much the same sort of information about the same people. A comparative analysis of these is also in progress.

Signalling a substantial reduction in our holdings has, however, and perhaps not surprisingly, resulted in a lot of angst among users and some who see themselves perhaps as potential users. Some people fear that vital records they will need to use for research or want to use for their pursuits or hobbies will be destroyed willy nilly. Some have experience to base this view on although when pressed, this often comes down to the destruction of individual files with (to that researcher) a potentially interesting file title. Some appear to assume that if a record is in an archives it must contain valuable and important information. Some see any such move as driven solely by economic considerations. Some, including people of whom we have no record of their ever having used one of our reading rooms, see the destruction of records as cultural vandalism to be resisted by whatever means can be brought to bear including orchestrated letter-writing campaigns to ministers, politicians and newspapers.

None of these views appear to show an understanding of appraisal and sentencing being a normal part of the recordkeeping process and the development of archival collections. Nor do they appear to accept the minimal usage made of the collection currently; or show an awareness of the advantages to users of the sort of cost benefit analysis outlined above; or reflect an understanding that what exists in our collection now, is the result of exactly the same sort of process, which is being undertaken to improve standards, more rigorously this time. The archives' view is that far from vandalising the collection, collection review is improving it.

83

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Que

en M

ary,

Uni

vers

ity o

f L

ondo

n] a

t 12:

14 1

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

AARL, June 2000

A great deal of the archives' resources goes into maintaining the current collection-particularly in the cost of buildings and their maintenance and in the costs of utilities such as airconditioning, but also in paying for additional records handling staff, preservation and location control and other such costs. These resources are then not available to document the collection and make it accessible in any meaningful way. The result is a large collection of which, for practical purposes, a great part is unapproachable, perhaps even totally inaccessible.

The archives is aiming at a smaller collection. It is doing this not because there is innate virtue in such a size. Rather it wants a smaller collection which consists only of records which have long term value and which researchers want to use. It will then use the resources thus freed up to document the collection in ways that meet user needs, and to make it available to them in ways that they want.

So-having identified records of higher value how does the National Archives make them more accessible to users? Firstly it asked the users. Over the last year or so it has endeavoured in a variety of ways to find out what they want, how they approach the records in the collection and what they want to be kept for them and made available to them.

Archives staff have approached various segments of the user population asking them for this information. And the archives tested the responses by examining how often researchers visit, what reading rooms they come to, what records they actually use in reading rooms, and what web pages they actually visit, as well as listening to what they tell us they do.

One definite conclusion from this is that researchers overwhelmingly approach, or try to approach, records either by personal name or by subject. Traditional archival finding aids are least useful for subject access. The standard way of locating information in archival collections is through a hierarchical search by function, creating agency, record series, and then by using the control records created when the series was in active use, to get to an individual record item. This item may be a 250 page file containing a range of diverse information with a totally unhelpful, even misleading, file title containing nothing of interest to the researcher.

Because of the way records are created and controlled archives do need comprehensive general access to their collections by function, creating agency, record series and so on. This is also needed for sophisticated researchers who know how to use records in the way they were created as well as for those producing finding aids for general researchers. The National Archives RecordSearch database goes further and does this to item level. At the moment it contains entries for 9000 agencies, organisations and Commonwealth persons, 80,000 record series and over 2,500,000 record items (or about 10% of the collection).

84

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Que

en M

ary,

Uni

vers

ity o

f L

ondo

n] a

t 12:

14 1

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

Macpherson: Improving Access

Eventually every item in the post-collection review holdings will have an item level entry on RecordSearch.

But the evidence to date suggests that users in general do not find this search strategy useful for subject searches and tend to use functions as proxy subjects or they search only item level entries, ignoring the other 90% of the collection. Of course archives have in practice always provided subject access to their collections, even if it has not always been embraced as theoretically necessary, or even desirable. Subject guides, source analyses, information sheets and subject based lists of various sorts have a long history. The issue the archives wanted to address was what subjects are researchers interested in and what sort of subject access do they want.

Information about subjects sought by archives reading room and reference service users is found in a variety of places. Eighteen primary sources of information were identified and examined and a scoring matrix developed for them. As a result of the process outlined above two lists of subjects were developed, one reflecting user identified common-use subject terminology; the other a list of subjects being researched by users of the collection using the Australian Bureau of Statistics/ Australian Research Council standard Australian subject list as the basis of the subject classification.

Both lists show that a relatively small number of subjects are of interest to users. This is most obvious in the case of the ABS/ARC based list where, even allowing for the addition of subject headings for areas not covered by that list, only 67 subjects were required to cover all use examined. However four of these subjects accounted for 50% of subject demand and 20 for 90%. These naturally enough reflect the primary functions of the Commonwealth government. There is a great deal of commonality across all the source subject demand lists and these lists echo reference officers' anecdotal evidence of user subject demand. Defence, foreign affairs, intelligence and security, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander issues, and immigration are the key subjects although these are segmented into sub-topics, and of course interest in name-identified records crosses all these and other subjects.

This information will be used to help define subjects which require research guides to be prepared, subjects about which web access pages will be developed and so on. It will also help inform priorities for arrangement and description work on the collection.

The archives also approached people, primarily genealogists, who access the collection seeking information about known individuals in order to find out what information they wanted about people, how they search for that information now and how they want to find it in the future. Genealogists were clear about what they didn't want: information

85

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Que

en M

ary,

Uni

vers

ity o

f L

ondo

n] a

t 12:

14 1

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

AARL, June 2000

databases, extracts or digests of information taken from the records. They were happy with copies of records and would like to see the best possible indexes to names of people in Commonwealth records. Although some thought that it was the responsibility of the archives to keep every document that had a name on it (and at least one focus group participant argued for every piece of paper with an initial) a majority accepted that if the archives could retain the best concise record documenting each major interaction of government and people, the archives would be discharging its responsibility to the community in this regard. This conclusion is the basis for the comparative analysis being carried out on defence and immigration records.

The archives also spoke to groups of experienced researchers around the country-academics and independent scholars-to find out what material users of records want to be kept. These groups do not represent the largest portion of users but they are sophisticated researchers who are regular and consistent users of reading rooms and archival services and who understand how to approach archives in a variety of ways.

This group evinced little general interest in retaining name identified case files. This was the opposite of the genealogists' position. They showed a strong understanding of the uses of and interest in retaining control records and consignment lists, the sort of recordkeeping impedimenta essential for making the most of the traditional functional approach to finding information in records. Interestingly they also reported strong interest in retaining state and regional office correspondence files before about 1960, but did not think them worth keeping after that date. This probably reflects a very good knowledge of the content of the records and a detailed understanding of the changing nature of Commonwealth administration and of recordkeeping as a result of improved communications and the ready availability of photocopying.

All these consultations and other feedback also revealed that users want the greatest possible web access to our holdings. Users of archives, and potential users of archives, are coming more and more from an information searching and research paradigm based on web access to digitised information. Scholarly users of archives now come from a world in which a large part of the information they require is delivered to their desktop by email, particularly through mail lists, e-journals directly accessed through WebPACs and with growing online access to significant digital library projects.

The most numerous group of archives users-genealogists--despite their usual stereotype are more and more members of a wired, online fraternity. Thirty-seven percent (significantly above the national average-and increasing) of newly registering researchers6 in the National

86

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Que

en M

ary,

Uni

vers

ity o

f L

ondo

n] a

t 12:

14 1

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

Macpherson: Improving Access

Archives give an email address as part of their personal information and contact details.

It is not unreasonable for people from these backgrounds to expect adequate archival customer service for researchers to mean access, in their studies or offices (or even through a public library or in an Internet cafe), to the finding aids and collections of archives. And use of the National Archives website (in line with similar institutions all over the world) is increasing rapidly. There were nearly half a million individual visitors to the site last year and figures for the first few months of this year show a 63% increase over the same period in 1999.

Although still well behind most libraries, the National Archives is well ahead of the archival pack in providing information about its collections online. It has had two databases (RINSE, which provides information about records creators and record series, and ANGAM II, which provides item level information about part of the collection) operating in its reading rooms and at the Australian War Memorial for about 15 years and available on its website since 1997 and 1998 respectively. RINSE and ANGAM have now been replaced by a new combined database, RecordSearch. The proportion of the collection with item level descriptions on RecordSearch will increase over time. The current target is to increase it by at least I 0% per year and this is being markedly exceeded consistently. One of the results of the collection review will be to put substantially more resources into this task.

However, a large number of respondents to the surveys and focus groups and an increasing number of website visitors who give feedback do not want just online access to information about the collection, but access to the collection itself. Some asserted quite bluntly that it was the archives' responsibility to digitise everything.

Here it is much more difficult for archives than for libraries. There is the huge bulk of the collection coupled with the relatively low and unpredictable use: archives are unique and therefore cannot gain the benefits from resource sharing that makes digital libraries so attractive. The unique nature of archival records also mandates high-level conservation requirements during copying, thus slowing the process. A large part of the information content of archival records is made up of the context of their creation and accretion, which must also be captured when records are imaged.7

It is because of these factors that digitising costs become prohibitive. For example, the National Archives does have an online photographic database which currently has a little over 5000 images accessible from its website8 and another 3000 or so soon to be added. The archives, however, holds about 2.5 kilometres of photographic items,9 or say perhaps 2,500,000 photographs. The current minimal cost to the archives of

87

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Que

en M

ary,

Uni

vers

ity o

f L

ondo

n] a

t 12:

14 1

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

AARL, June 2000

scanning one photograph and making it available on its website is approximately $1.35 and it takes a minimum of about 15 minutes. The cost of scanning all the photographs would therefore be over $3,000,000 and it would take about 90 staff years to do.

Photographs are less than 1% of records of enduring archival value in the archives' collection. And, because of their relative homogeneity of medium and form, photographs take less time to image than textual documents in traditional file format if the same copying techniques are used. But even if we were to assume that the cost and time of digitising text files was the same as for graphical images, to copy in this way the permanent value collection for online access would cost more than $3 billion. And this figure doesn't include metadata capture, data storage or maintenance costs. Clearly the unthinking demand by some that the archives should digitise the entire collection is not feasible.

Added to this is the fact that relatively little is known about individual researcher use of records. A very large part, almost certainly the majority, of all records in archival custody will never be used by any researcher. But it appears impossible to predict which those are.

None of this means that the archives shouldn't try to meet its clients' demands. And what it is trying to do is to digitise records of whose value and potential for use it can be certain, and groups of records, primarily of genealogical utility, which receive high overall use, even if individual items within that group may never be used.

The de facto standards for digitising archival material derive in large part from the work in the US of Anne Kenney at Cornell and RLG. 10

These suggest that because the costs of document preparation and image capture are by far the most time consuming and costly parts of digitising they should be done once only. This leads to a conclusion that the image must be captured at a very high resolution (usually a standard of image suitable for high quality text reproduction and publishing) with lower resolution derivatives created for various purposes including web access. The corollary of this is that image capture is very slow because of the time taken to ensure that everything is just perfect and consequently, because of the labour costs, very expensive.

The archives knew that were it to follow this approach it would be unable to capture anything like the quantity of records which would be likely to satisfy user demand, or indeed its own views on what would constitute a reasonable level of digitisation. It examined the North American practice carefully and realised that the guidelines were based primarily on work with graphical images-paintings and photographs-or rare books in which exact reproduction was an important consideration and for which a variety of uses, including exhibitions and publication of reproductions could be reasonably predicted.

88

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Que

en M

ary,

Uni

vers

ity o

f L

ondo

n] a

t 12:

14 1

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

Macpherson: Improving Access

The archives is, however, looking at digitising solely as an alternative and, for many users, better form of access. It is digitising material so that people can get at the information in the records, primarily standard file material, and it expects other use of the digital objects to be minimal. It therefore decided to experiment with lower standard copying.

A series of trials is examining copying a variety of materials in different ways. Flat bed scanners, digital cameras on stands as overhead scanners, microfilm to digital conversion and high speed conversion of photocopied material are all being trialled. Items are being copied from the most used research guides, samples of items from high use genealogical records and some items from complicated and fragile series are also being captured as well as a selection of items from Foreign Affairs files for a first year course in International Relations at the University of Newcastle. Students in this course will access the records directly from RecordSearch. This will both familiarise the students with archives and their scholarly potential and also enable testing of the acceptability of the process and the product. In all these cases the aim has now become to capture the image at the lowest standard possible that allows legibility both on the screen and of a printout from the screen.

The tentative conclusion so far is that scanning by overhead camera is the most effective and cost effective means and interestingly also provides online researchers with access to material in a way which as closely as possible mirrors the way material would be presented to them in a reading room. This is because unlike all other traditional archival copying programs folios are not removed from files individually for copying. Rather, the operators leave the file pin in place and turn the pages as they capture the image in much the same way as a researcher would turn the pages in the reading room.

Because RecordSearch is the archives' key finding aid and because every item will eventually be listed on RecordSearch it makes sense to attach the scanned images to the database. This is what is being done. Any one who retrieves an entry for an item which has been scanned will automatically also retrieve the digital copy of the item which will load automatically and be presented on the screen with the descriptive and contextual data about the item. Trials have proved this to be effective and later this year copies of records as they are digitised will also become widely available in this way. Although the trials are continuing and evaluation hardly started, indications clearly seem to support the effectiveness of the directions taken.

If the archives selects the records to be digitised in accordance with the information provided by users and reflecting the subjects of interest and the types of records they want, then it will in this way help achieve its strategic direction. It will also move towards satisfying expressed user

89

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Que

en M

ary,

Uni

vers

ity o

f L

ondo

n] a

t 12:

14 1

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

AARL, June 2000

needs and will open access to the collection to a far wider potential user group than could ever have been imagined a few years ago. And it will be doing it far more cheaply than thought possible when the issue of digitisation was first examined, as well as providing far more equitable access in what seems likely to be a cost effective way.

Notes National Archives of Australia and National Archives of Australia Advisory Council Annual Reports, 1998-99 Canberra National Archives of Australia 1999 pl2

2 This outline of appraisal emphasises only the last stage of the National Archives' sophisticated appraisal methodology, based on the Australian Standard AS 4390-1996 Records Management, which reflects the view that appraisal is a process that leads to decisions to create, capture and maintain records as well as to decisions to destroy or dispose of them. This is explained in Appraisal Guidelines for Commonwealth Records http://www .naa.gov .au/recordkeeping/disposal/appraisal! intro.html (accessed 16 May 2000)

3 National Archives of Australia and National Archives of Australia Advisory Council Annual Reports op cit p 19

4 http://www.naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/splash!intro.html (accessed 16 May 2000) 5 National Archives of Australia and National Archives of Australia Advisory

Council Annual Report, op cit pp4& 16 6 Based on researcher registrations for RecordSearch 7 Paul Macpherson 'Providing Digital Online Access to Archives for Researchers'

Archives in the National Research Infrastructure, National Scholarly Communications Forum Round Table No 10 (November 1999) http://www .asap.unimelb.edu.au/nscf/roundtables/rl 0/r 10 _ macpherson.html (accessed 16 May 2000)

8 http://www.naa.gov.au/RESEARCH/DFATDB/defatdb.htm (accessed 16 May 2000)

9 National Archives of Australia and National Archives of Australia Advisory Council Annual Reports op cit p20

10 Anne Kenney and Oya Reiger Managing Digital Imaging Projects: Workshop Materials Mountain View CA Research Libraries Group 1997. (Kenney and Reiger have just published Moving Theory into Practice Mountain View CA Research Libraries Group 2000 on digital imaging for archives and libraries, but which has not been seen by the author.)

90

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Que

en M

ary,

Uni

vers

ity o

f L

ondo

n] a

t 12:

14 1

1 O

ctob

er 2

014