TOWARDS FEDERATION 2001
Linking Australians and their Heritage
Report of Review Meeting, 9-10 December 1993
Introduction
On 9-10 December, representatives of 29 organisations met to review progress since the "Towards Federation 2001: Linking Australians with their Heritage" Conference held in March 1992. That conference had 86 resolutions as its outcome, and over the past 21 months, the National Library has attempted to monitor progress on those resolutions. Since early 1993, a planning committee of National Library staff, supplemented by Gordon Bower as ACLIS representative and Fran Awcock as the representative of the Council of Australian State Libraries, had been engaged on a thorough assessment of each resolution, its progress or lack thereof, and possible changes in the objective or action mechanism which might lead to faster and better progress in future.
The planning committee prepared a series of assessment papers for the various development areas: collecting, bibliographical access, physical access, preservation, copyright, and services to special communities, which formed the basis of the agenda, together with redrafted resolutions. Many conference resolutions which could be achieved only through internal actions by many institutions with "significant Australian Collections," were regrouped as a proposed set of guidelines to be suggested as an action framework to such institutions.
Invited to the Review Meeting were the organisations which had been given carriage of resolutions from the 1992 conference, plus a few other organisations whose output was regarded as desirable for future progress. The meeting was ably chaired by Professor John Levett, Head of the School of Library and Information Studies at Monash University, who steered the meeting with considerable skill and much harmony, in what was generally agreed to be a very successful process. General reactions have suggested that the planning committee had been very successful in removing ambiguities from some of the original conference resolutions, and in identifying more effective mechanisms for action - while those present at the Review Meeting also made substantial changes and improvements to many of the draft resolutions and introduced a number of new objectives. In the case of copyright issues, delegates agreed that the whole agenda was now changed by the Commonwealth Government's announcement in early November of a major review of copyright legislation, and the meeting endorsed the establishment of a copyright committee of ACLIS, ACA, CASL, CAUL, CSIRO and the National Library to develop appropriate positions on behalf of the library and archives communities.
The meeting agreed on a total of 59 resolutions which encapsulated most of the original conference intent, updated in the light of experience and changing circumstances. A further 22 resolutions have been included in the form of "Advice to institutions" bringing suggested guidelines for action to the attention to those in the field.
The National Library is confident that the agenda for the Towards Federation 2001 objectives of enabling Australians to have:
- the world's best national system for providing access to documentary records which will enable an understanding of the history and development of the nation and its people, and
- a system which will enable all Australians, from their home, place of work or a publicly accessible information service point, to locate all significant items of the Australian recorded documentary heritage, and to obtain access to the intellectual contents of those items within a reasonable time, at a reasonable cost
has been reset effectively for the medium term. The Review Meeting
agreed that a further review of objectives and progress should be considered
sometime during 1996. Eric Wainwright
Convenor, Towards Federation 2001
Conference & Review Meeting.
Return to Report of Review Meeting, 9-10 December 1993
Last updated 10 June 1998
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