Staff Papers

Collecting Archives in the Next Millenium

Paper by Adrian Cunningham, paper presented to the Australian Society of Archivists Annual Conference, Adelaide, July 1997


One of my University history teachers once told me that there is a good book to be written which catalogues some of the more ludicrous attempts down the years at predicting the future. He even had a name for this book, 'Past Futures'. Clearly, anyone silly enough to attempt to predict the future must suffer from both dangerous delusions of prescience and a complete lack of shame. It is certainly not my intention today to attempt to predict what collecting archives will be like in 200 years time. What I will endeavour to do, however, is describe what I think collecting archives ought to be like in ten or twenty years time if they are to maximise their relevance and contribution to society.

THE NEED TO REINVENT

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the world of archives will know that substantial transformations are occurring in the world of government and corporate archives, triggered largely by the advent of electronic records.1 For example there is the visionary work at the Records Management Office of New South Wales being carried out under the guidance of David Roberts 2 as well as last year's impressively forward-looking report of the Parliamentary Inquiry into the Public Record Office Victoria.3 At a national level, the endorsement by the Australian Council of Archives (http://www.aa.gov.au/AA_WWW/ProAssn/ACA/ACA.HTM) of the position statement 'Corporate Memory in the Electronic Age' and the publication of the Australian Standard for Records Management (AS4390) both represent significant landmarks in the reinvention of recordkeeping in Australia.4

In contrast, the collecting archives sector appears to be operating largely on a 'business as usual' basis. Yet it is my contention that collecting archives also need to embark upon a process of reinvention. I believe this is necessary if collecting archives are to achieve their mission of supporting the nation's collective memory by preserving and providing access to valuable documentary evidence of Australian social, cultural and intellectual activity.

As I see it there are two fundamental problems to which collecting archives in this country need to find solutions urgently. These are:

1. The increasing rarity of reliable, comprehensible and durable recordkeeping systems and practices in unregulated or semi-regulated record creating environments; and

2. The lack of a coordinated national system for identifying, preserving and making available for ongoing societal reference a selection of private archival fonds which collectively constitute adequate documentation of Australian social, cultural and intellectual life in all its various manifestations.

If collecting archives are to solve these two problems they need to undergo a major process of reinvention. This will not mean changing everything we do, but it will require some seismic shifts in policy and practice in a number of areas. It is worth noting here that only the first of these two problems is the result of the advent of electronic records. The second problem has been with us for many years and still demands urgent attention.

A CONCEPTUAL MATRIX

Just how can collecting archives reinvent themselves to address these two problems?

Last year, as a part of an internal strategic planning exercise at the National Library, a group of us endeavoured to develop a model for cooperative action which could help address these problems at a national level. We mapped the complete conceptual landscape of collecting archives in Australia by means of a matrix which we called a 'Matrix to Identify Partners and Strategies for Ensuring Access to Private Archival Records in Both Paper-Based and Electronic Form'. In developing this matrix we endeavoured to identify:

1. The major subsidiary components of the collecting archives mission;

2. The issues associated with each of these components;

3. Potential strategies for dealing with these issues;

4. Potential partners in the implementation of these strategies; and

5. Specific recommendations for action by the National Library.

By the end of the process we had produced 27 specific recommendations for action by the National Library. Of course, anyone can produce recommendations, it is much harder to have them implemented in an environment of shrinking resources and competing priorities. Nevertheless, the process was extremely valuable and I would like to take this opportunity to share with you some of the results of our thinking. It is not possible for me to walk through the entire matrix in the time available. I will, however, summarise the major components and issues identified in the matrix and sketch out some of the more significant strategies of reinvention which I believe collecting archives will need to pursue if they are to fulfill their mission in the next millennium.

At the most basic level the matrix identified four components in the collecting archives mission: getting, organising, keeping and accessing. Before I proceed any further I should explain these shorthand terms which, by themselves, could be quite ambiguous. 'Getting' refers to the creation and capture of records into recordkeeping systems in the private domain and the process of identifying and transferring records of major ongoing societal value into the public domain, more often than not by means of a transfer of custody to a collecting archive. 'Organising' refers to the establishment of intellectual and physical control of records by collecting archives and the associated work of making descriptive metadata about the collections available to the nation. 'Keeping' refers to the preservation or orderly destruction of records or, in other words, ensuring the physical defence of the integrity of records through custodial arrangements, retention/disposal schedules, migration strategies, etc. Finally, 'Accessing' refers to the provision of on-site, remote and networked access to records for researchers and other clients.

Those of you who are familiar with continuum based thinking will know that many of these components bleed into or overlap with each other. Nevertheless, even in a continuum based world it is useful to be able to divide the landscape up conceptually into digestible chunks to aid analysis and understanding. At the Monash University "Managing the Records Continuum' workshops last year I explored the possibility of marrying my matrix with Frank Upward's four dimensional model of the records continuum.5 This exercise, which not surprisingly ended up locating most of my matrix in Frank's fourth or 'pluralising' dimension, merely highlighted the fact that the two conceptual models are attempting to do quite different things. While Frank's model is a conceptual map of the entire recordkeeping universe, all my matrix is attempting to do is map the actual operations of collecting archives within that universe.

STRATEGIES FOR GETTING

This is the area of collecting archives activity that I believe requires the most reinvention. In this area both of the problems highlighted earlier need to be addressed.

The first problem is the increasing rarity of reliable, comprehensible and durable recordkeeping systems and practices in unregulated or semi-regulated record creating environments. Historically, perhaps the major difference between collecting archives and corporate/government archives is the lack of involvement in the front end of records creation by collecting archivists. This is because such records creators rarely see the need, nor have the opportunity, to request professional recordkeeping assistance. The result is that recordkeeping practices vary widely. Usually it is a matter of chance as to whether or not records documenting significant activities are properly created and maintained. In the past collecting archivists have been content to accept this as a situation over which they have little control. Accordingly, we have built our collections on the random remainders of those recordkeeping systems that happen to be halfways decent.

While this approach may have been reasonably acceptable in the world of paper-based records, it patently will not do in the world of electronic records. If we employ our traditional practice of waiting until the death of active private recordkeeping systems before bringing them under archival control (or 'picking up after the kids') it will, in the case of electronic records, be too late to rescue meaningful and useable records. Just as corporate/government archivists have recognised the need to become far more proactive in the design and operation of active recordkeeping systems, so must collecting archivists bite the bullet and overcome their aversion to front end involvement. Of course this will not be easy, but it is not impossible.6 There are strategies that can be employed.

Of course, front end involvement with a multitude of individual records creators has the potential to be extremely labour intensive. However, as David Bearman pointed out at the Monash workshops last year, this will probably be a whole lot less labour intensive in the long run, because you won't then have to spend countless hours making sense of an undocumented mess you inherit from a dead donor. In any case I believe that the best strategy for minimising the labour intensiveness of front end involvement is to ensure that software systems used by records creators have desirable recordkeeping attributes embedded within their systems design.

Another objection that has been voiced in reaction to my suggestions concerning front end involvement has come from those who fear that such involvement may impair the impartiality and unselfconsciousness of the records. It intrigues me that this issue, which has its roots in Jenkinsonian theory, is of such concern to collecting archivists when at the same time it has presented no apparent philosophical problem for our government archives colleagues in this country, who have been doing it for years and hope to do more of the same in the future. My answer to the objection is that, despite what Jenkinson may have had us believe, recordkeeping is always a partial and self-conscious activity.7 The thing to do is not to deny the partiality or self-consciousness of records, but to recognise it and manage it professionally through the creation and maintenance of adequate contextual metadata which can aid subsequent understandings and interpretations of the records. In any case, in answer to this objection, I would simply state that self-conscious records are better than no records at all.

The other major objection to front end involvement is that appraisal and selection decisions can often only be made with the benefit of hindsight. I certainly agree that it will not always be possible to recognise the longer term significance of record groups at the time of their creation. The Eddie Mabo papers are a perfect case in point, in that the significance of Mabo's achievements did not become apparent until after his death.8 Examples such as this should not however, prevent us from becoming involved in the front end of records creation in those cases where we already know that the records will have long term societal value. In order to deal with cases such as Mabo it will always be necessary for collecting archives to include a 'post hoc' component in their acquisitions programs in order to rescue those significant fonds that they were not able, for whatever reason, to bring under archival control at the time of creation of the records.

To summarise, collecting archives in the next millennium will need to collaborate more closely with records creators, they will need to actively promote the value of good recordkeeping practices to those who operate in unregulated or semi-regulated recordkeeping environments and they will need to work towards the embedding of desirable recordkeeping attributes in the design of software programs used by such recordkeepers. To be able to carry out these tasks effectively, and in particular to know exactly what are the software design features we require, I believe we need to acquire a better understanding of recordkeeping in unregulated environments. As Chris Hurley argued in his paper 'Beating the French'9, we need to conduct research in order to better understand the societal warrants for historical recordkeeping and the functional requirements for evidence in personal recordkeeping. We need to acquire a better understanding of the dynamics of personal recordkeeping behaviour in order to develop suitable documentation strategies and metadata standards. To this end, and in order to identify some of the potential pitfalls of front end involvement in the unregulated domain, we need to run pilot research projects with individual records creators. We need to research phenomena such as the fact that many personal electronic records reside in electronic systems not owned by the individual records creators (such as personal email records residing on employers' systems) and the archival challenges of preserving personal home pages. Finally, we need to conduct research into the additional documentation possibilities created by the spread of personal electronic recordkeeping systems.10

The second problem in the 'Getting' area is the lack of a cooperative and coordinated national system for identifying and bringing under archival control an adequate and representative selection of private archival fonds documenting national identity. It is probably an understatement to assert that, at a level of national aggregation, there is plenty of room for improvement in the way that Australia's collecting archives manage to document life in our nation. Hitherto, there has been very little in the way of national coordination of the efforts of the various collecting archives. Individual collecting archives determine their collection policies in relation to their own institutional objectives and mandates. Sometimes these policies take account of the activities of other archives working in the field and sometimes they don't. Occasionally, pairs of archives may agree formally or informally on ways of dividing up territory where there is potential for overlap. Rarely, does anyone stop to think of what important documentary evidence may be being ignored because it falls outside of everyone's collection development policies.

Of course, Australia is not unique in this. Back in 1984 Faye Phillips lamented in The American Archivist that "sporadic, unplanned, competitive and overlapping manuscript collecting has led to the growth of poor collections of marginal value".11 More recently Graeme Powell has surveyed the holdings of Australia's collecting archives and found that the national collection of private archives is alarmingly lopsided in its documentation of society.12 Richard Cox has argued that collecting archives waste a worryingly high proportion of their limited resources collecting material which, to put it bluntly, is junk.13

What can we do about this situation? Elsewhere I have advocated the adoption in Australia of a version of the Canadian 'total archives' approach to the archival endeavour.14 Certainly collecting archivists are not the only archivists who have a responsibility to document society. We need to not only cooperate amongst ourselves, but across the entire archival spectrum to ensure that we achieve our societal mission. Of course in Canada such cooperation is easier because there is not the split between 'archives' and 'manuscript repositories' that exists in Australia and the USA. Nevertheless, the nature of the Australian scene is no excuse for not pursuing a holistic and cooperative approach to the archival endeavour.

In fact, what I believe we need to develop in Australia is a hybrid between the 'total archives' approach and the approach pursued within the Australian library community that has become known as the 'distributed national collection'. I am not the first to think of this. As far back as 1979 Canadian Terry Cook argued that the 'total archives' concept needs to be developed to include a notion of networked repositories so as to establish "an institutional system of archives ... to ensure that the records of all significant human endeavour are preserved".15 More recently of course Australians have become familiar with the related but quite different concept of 'distributed custody'.

In a recent piece in Archivaria titled "Thinking Globally, Acting Locally", Christopher Hives stated the case far better than I ever could:

" ... we must shift our focus away from individual repositories and towards a more holistic approach which embodies a collective or shared responsibility for the preservation of private records. ... we must look for opportunities to pool our collective resources in the acquisition of private records ... [ensuring that] whatever resources we have available for this purpose are used in the most judicious, effective and efficient means possible. The preservation of private records must be viewed as the collective responsibility of the archival community as a whole, not the individual responsibility of any one repository."16

In an era of shrinking real funding bases, publicly funded collecting archives can no longer afford to waste resources in duplicating the efforts of others or in controlling and preserving material that is of little, if any, long term national value.

In order to pursue a nationally coordinated approach to our documentation mission we need to, in the words of David Bearman, 'focus our appraisal methods on selecting what should be documented rather than what documentation should be kept'.17 To do this properly we need to conduct research in order to develop a better understanding of the societal warrants for historical documentation and recordkeeping. We need to develop a nationally agreed agenda setting out those activities, functions, relationships and entities that need to be documented. We need to reach national agreement on the allocation of institutional responsibilities for documenting particular aspects of Australian life and we need to ensure that such a national system minimises duplication of effort and maximises the coverage of agreed priority areas. In the words of Richard Cox we need to identify the most "salient and important features of contemporary institutions and society"18 and do our level best to ensure that adequate documentary evidence of these features is captured and preserved by archives. Nor should this be an entirely elitist exercise. Also in the words of Richard Cox, "Part of this documentation has to be sensitive to the underdocumented and often powerless elements of society".19

STRATEGIES FOR ORGANISING

The major reinvention challenge faced by collecting archivists (and all other archivists as well for that matter) in the area of 'Organising' is, once again, that of national coordination. When I mention the words 'descriptive standards' and 'metadata' most of you will know exactly what I am talking about. For many years now Chris Hurley has been campaigning for the development and adoption of nationally agreed standards for archival documentation.20 To this end Chris has been working on the development of the Australian Common Practice Manual (ACPM). Simultaneously he has been brooding on a variety of philosophical and theoretical issues to do with contextual metadata, 'ambient' functions, authority control of records creating entities, and the intellectual processes involved in mapping the relationships between entities, functions, context and records.21 Hurley's work is of the most profound importance to all of us. I think Chris would not argue with me, however, if I were to state that progress towards a practical resolution of the descriptive standards issue has been somewhat delayed by these theoretical ruminations. Quite rightly Chris is concerned to get the theory right before developing a practical edifice that may be based upon unsound theoretical foundations.

Much of Chris Hurley's deliberations relate to the potential for virtual or networked archives, which have been made possible because of the advent of electronic records. Yet quite independently of the world of electronic records, practical developments are occurring which have ramifications in the area of intellectual control. Examples of such developments include the development and adoption of such national and international standards as MARC-AMC, ISAD-G, ISAAR (CPF), APPM, EAD, MAD, RAD, GILS, the Dublin Core metadata set, the Pittsburgh metadata requirements for evidence, and the descriptive format used by the National Library of Australia's RAAM (Register of Australian Archives and Manuscripts) database. These standards related developments are occurring in response to the perceived urgent need to develop mechanisms for the sharing of archival metadata in a networked environment. In an interesting development, Wendy Duff and others have recently initiated attempts to reconcile or cross-map the descriptive elements of these various standards.22 All the same, as largely records-centred strategies, most if not all of these developments would fall short of the kind of brave new world of integrated documentation standards being advocated by Chris Hurley.

As I see it the main challenge for the future in this area not only involves getting archives in Australian to use a common set of standards, it also involves finding a way to marry the bottom-up or records-centred descriptive approaches of the existing standards with the top-down or functions/context-oriented approach being advocated by Chris Hurley. I sincerely hope, but cannot be sure, that we will be able to find some common conceptual ground between the two. This is a non-trivial exercise. Success in this area will require the goodwill and wholehearted commitment of the entire archival community. Failure would, I fear, condemn us to marginality and irrelevancy in the context of Australia's broader cultural endeavours. As a first step I strongly endorse Chris Hurley's suggestion that we convene a national conference on the control of archival metadata in cyberspace.23 At the same time I would like to see work commence on the development of a functions thesaurus for private archival records.

Another challenge facing us in the area of 'Organising' is the development of integrated regimes of intellectual control for both paper-based and electronic records. It should be self-evident that we cannot sustain parallel systems for the two types of records. Indeed, to do so would be a disservice to both the records and our clients. Nevertheless, developing such integrated regimes is easy to say, harder to do. I do not have the time here to explore possible scenarios, but wish merely to flag the issue as one that will require attention and for which there are probably no easy answers.

Finally, before leaving 'Organising' I would like to state my agreement with Chris Hurley and Luciana Duranti, that it will never be possible to satisfy all our description/metadata requirements using systems-generated metadata created at the point of records creation. There will always be a need for archivists to link records to human-created contextual and aggregate level metadata created, in many cases, through traditional post-hoc descriptive practices. Having said that, however, I believe we must use automated metadata generating or self-documenting facilities as much as possible in order to allow scarce archival professional skills to be spread across the largest possible number of records.

STRATEGIES FOR KEEPING

I expect that those present here today who consider themselves to be post-custodialists will be bristling at my use of the term 'keeping'. I would point out, however, that even in a post-custodial world records have to be kept by someone. Elsewhere I have argued that the opportunities for collecting archives to pursue distributed custody strategies will be extremely limited.24 In most cases there will be no alternative to collecting archives taking physical custody of records they wish to control. This is largely because of the transient nature of most of the records creating entities with which collective archives have to deal. For example, individual donors have an unfortunate habit of dying and their relatives can rarely be relied upon to maintain the integrity of record groups, let alone facilitate ongoing access to those records either through computerised networks or otherwise. Moreover, in the case of electronic records, if we get things right at the front end collecting archives can take records into custody in the confidence that they should be able to maintain the integrity and functionality of those records with relative ease, at least until the first migration becomes necessary. Of course, to manage electronic records properly, collecting archives will need to reinvent themselves as centres of information technology excellence. This will involve acquiring IT skills, most often through the employment of IT professionals.

Nevertheless, I do envisage that in the next millennium there will be a growing trend towards distributed custody of private organisational records in this country. In the past collecting archives have often substantially boosted their shelf meterage by taking into custody large runs of paper records of medium to large sized businesses and non-government organisations. However, as resource cutbacks begin to bite, fewer and fewer collecting archives are able to do this, regardless of whether the records are paper-based or electronic. The solution is to encourage those organisations to set up their own in-house archives. In order to ensure the ongoing retention and availability of the records of those organisations which are of broader social and historical significance, there will need to be a nationally coordinated effort which recognises and perhaps even rewards those in-house archives which honour their public cultural and historical obligations. In other words the contribution of these archives to the 'distributed national collection' needs to be acknowledged and fostered.

Managing the migration of electronic records will be a major challenge facing collecting archives in the next millennium. Of course this is not an issue that is confined to collecting archives. Again, lack of time prevents me from saying anything more about migration here, other than to highlight it as an issue of the future. I would refer those who have an interest in the topic to a paper by Margaret Hedstrom entitled 'Research Issues in Migration and Long-Term Preservation', which she presented to the Working meeting on Electronic Records Research held in Pittsburgh at the end of May this year.25

STRATEGIES FOR ACCESSING

In describing desirable future access regimes for the holdings of collecting archives I can do no better than endorse a set of strategies proposed recently by Margaret Hedstrom.26 Margaret argues that, if we want people to continue using archives, we have to design access and service regimes that dovetail with their information seeking habits and expectations. Users of the future will require integrated and seamless means of networked online discovery, identification, interpretation, understanding and retrieval of archival source material. We will need to design and implement linked, multi-layered, user-friendly means of networked access to archival metadata and actual records. Online search facilities will need to be able to respond to natural language search requests. These access regimes will need to provide access both to original electronic records, digitised collections and detailed online finding aids describing holdings which are not (yet) available in digital form. It goes without saying that these regimes of access and use will need to span a variety of custodial arrangements.

Integrated systems of access are essential. Users should not be expected to have to search separate catalogues or databases to identify or select materials relevant to their research need. Wherever possible archives should orient their access services in such a way as to give equal priority to both on-site and remote users. Wherever possible, self-service facilities should be put in place in order to minimise the need for expensive human intervention. Ideally, access restrictions should be administered and controlled by automated means.

For all of this to be possible archives will of course need to adopt the use of standards. There will need to be a high level of national planning and cooperation to ensure that users get the best out of the national archival system that their taxes support. Archives will need to mount as many of their finding aids on the World Wide Web as possible and link these descriptions into nationally networked systems of resource discovery. The most significant paper-based record groups will need to be digitised, mounted on the Web and linked to suitable descriptive metadata and online resource discovery mechanisms. In addition, archives will need to provide 'digitisation on demand' services.

We will also need to put more effort into understanding our clients. There is a tragic dearth of user studies in the archival sector. We need a better understanding of usage patterns, information seeking behaviour, human-machine interaction and user satisfaction levels. In addition, we need to have a better understanding of potential and future users who, in the words of Margaret Hedstrom, may well have needs that 'differ considerably from those of the current user population'.27

Finally, we will need to make greater use of emerging technology to deliver pre-packaged archival information to identified constituencies. These could be in the form of online exhibitions, virtual school kits highlighting the potential for archival research and discovery and any number of other innovative online service delivery options.

To conclude, I would like to leave you with two final meta-issues with which collecting archives in the next millennium should be prepared to grapple. Firstly, I believe we have to become much less insular in our dealings with the broader archival profession. We all know how much we have in common with our corporate and government colleagues, so we should be prepared to engage them in dialogue as equal partners in pursuit of a common mission. It is imperative that we involve ourselves in the mainstream archival discourse in order to ensure that this discourse does not ignore our needs and problems. Moreover, if we are to successfully reinvent our programs, we need to keep ourselves fully conversant with the latest advances in mainstream archival thinking.

Finally, I believe that we have to do a much better job of articulating the social, cultural and historical role of archives, lest the archival world become dominated by narrower legal, corporate, juridical and accountability considerations. The two sets of roles are not mutually exclusive, but instead inter-relate very closely. Nevertheless both need to be recognised and nurtured for, if they are not, we will be a much poorer profession as a result. Articulation of the social, cultural and historical role of archives is not necessarily as straightforward as we may think. I fear that in recent times we have been too inclined to take our understanding of this role for granted. This is a mistake. We need to conduct sophisticated ongoing research into this aspect of archives, research that can match the levels of sophistication demonstrated by recent research into the corporate/juridical role of archives. A good starting point here is the landmark article by Sue McKemmish, 'Evidence of Me ....' which appeared in Archives and Manuscripts last year.28

As it is difficult to find a better note to end a paper on than the wonderful 'Evidence of Me ...', I shall conclude my paper here and thank you all for letting me indulge some of my hobby horses.

ENDNOTES

1. A. Cunningham, 'Ensuring Essential Evidence', National Library of Australia News, vol. 7, no. 2, Nov. 1996, pp. 6-8.

2. D. Roberts, 'From Policy to Practice: A Whole Government Approach to Records Management in New South Wales', Paper prepared for presentation at an IIR Conference: Electronic Document and Records Management for Corporate and Public Sector Environments Sydney, 5 February 1997; Records Management Office, Archives Authority of New South Wales, Steering Into the Future: Electronic Recordkeeping in New South Wales, Sydney, 1997.

3. Victoria. Parliament. Public Accounts and Estimates Committee, Report on the Public Record Office, Victoria, Melbourne, 1996.

4. Australian Council of Archives, Corporate Memory in the Electronic Age: statement of a common position on electronic recordkeeping, Melbourne, 1996; Australian Standard AS4390, Records Management, 1996.

5. F. Upward, 'Structuring the Records Continuum Part One: Post-custodial principles and properties', Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 24, no. 2, Nov. 1996, pp. 268-285.

6. A. Cunningham, 'The Archival Management of Personal Records in Electronic Form: some suggestions', Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 22, no. 1, May 1994, pp. 94-105.

7. A. Cunningham, 'The Mysterious Outside Reader', Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 24, no. 1, May 1996, pp. 130-144; Terry Cook has much of interest to say on this topic in his 'Electronic Records, Paper Minds', Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 22, no. 2, Nov. 1994, pp. 315-319.

8. A. Cunningham, 'The Chamberlain and Mabo Papers: case studies of personal papers of national symbolic significance', in Archives at the Centre: Proceedings of the Australian Society of Archivists Conference Alice Spings 24-25 May 1996, Canberra, 1997, pp. 98-103.

9. C. Hurley, 'Beating the French', Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 24, no. 1, May 1996, pp. 12-18.

10. T. Hyry and R. Onuf, 'The Personality of Electronic Records: the impact of new information technology on personal papers', in Archival Issues: Journal of the Midwest Archives Conference, forthcoming.

11. F. Phillips, 'Developing Collecting Policies for Manuscript Collections', American Archivist, vol. 47, Winter 1984, p. 31.

12. G. Powell, 'The Collecting of Personal and Private Papers in Australia', Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 24, no. 1, May 1996, pp. 62-77.

13. R. Cox, 'The Record in the Manuscript Collection', Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 24, no. 1, May 1996, pp. 46-61.

14. A. Cunningham, 'Beyond the Pale? The 'flinty' relationship between archivists who collect the private records of individuals and the rest of the archival profession', Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 24, no. 1, May 1996, pp. 20-26.

15. T. Cook, 'The Tyranny of the Medium: a Comment on 'Total Archives'', Archivaria, no. 9, Winter 1979-80, pp. 141-142.

16. C. Hives, 'Thinking Globally, Acting Locally', Archivaria, no. 38, Fall 1994, p. 159.

17. D. Bearman, Archival Methods: Archives and Museums Technical Report, no. 3, Spring 1989, pp. 14-15.

18. R. Cox, 'The Documentation Strategy and Archival Appraisal Principles: a different perspective', Archivaria, no. 38, Fall 1994, p. 24.

19. Ibid., p. 29.

20. C. Hurley, 'Standardisation 1987: a Recapitulation', Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 18, no. 1, May 1990, pp. 63-73; C. Hurley, 'Data, Systems, Management, and Standardisation', Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 22, no. 2, Nov. 1994, pp. 338-359; and C. Hurley, 'Standards, Standardisation, and Documentation' in Archives at the Centre: Proceedings of the Australian Society of Archivists Conference Alice Springs 24-25 May 1996, Canberra, 1997, pp. 60-65.

21. C. Hurley, 'What, if Anything, is a Function?', Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 21, no. 2, Nov. 1993, pp. 208-220; C. Hurley, 'The Australian ("series") System: an exposition', in S. McKemmish and M. Piggott (eds), The Records Continuum: Ian Maclean and Australian Archives First Fifty Years, Clayton, 1994, pp. 150-172; C. Hurley, 'Problems with Provenance', Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 23, no. 2, Nov. 1995, pp. 234-259; and C. Hurley, 'Ambient Functions - Abandoned Children to Zoos', Archivaria, no. 40, Fall 1995, pp. 21-39.

22. D. Bearman and W. Duff, 'Grounding Archival Description in the Functional Requirements for Evidence', Archivaria, no. 41, Spring 1996, pp. 275-303; and W. Duff and K. Haworth, 'More Than Just Alphabet Soup: Incorporating RAD, ISAD(G), APPM, EAD and the Dublin Core into a comprehensive model for the description off archival materials', Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 25, no. 2, Nov. 1997, forthcoming.

23. C. Hurley, posting to the aus-archivists listserv, 3 September 1996.

24. A. Cunningham (1994), op. cit., p. 99; and A. Cunningham, 'Journey to the End of the Night: custody and the dawning of a new era on the archival threshold', Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 24, no. 2, Nov. 1996, p. 321.

25. M. Hedstrom, 'Research Issues in Migration and Long Term Preservation', paper presented at the Working Meeting on Electronic Records Research, Pittsburgh, May 1997. (Available at: http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~cerar/s5-mh.html)

26. M. Hedstrom, 'How do we Make Electronic Archives Useable and Accessible?', paper presented at the Documenting the Digital Age Conference, 1997. (Available at: http://dtda.mci.com/presenta/hedstr01.htm)

27. Ibid.

28. S. McKemmish, 'Evidence of Me ...', Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 24, no. 1, May 1996, pp. 28-45.


Adrian Cunningham, NIAC Section, July 1997
Last updated 24 July 1997

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