Origins Australia is a young nation with an even younger archival profession. When the Dutch Manual was published in 1898 Australia did not even exist as a nation -we had to wait another three years for that particular milestone. We had to wait another 50 years before a national archivist was appointed, albeit as a rather minor functionary within the Parliamentary Library. Indeed, it was not until the 1960s that the archival profession in Australia reached any sort of critical mass. Moreover, we had to wait until 1975 before our archival professional association, the Australian Society of Archivists, was established. Perhaps because of our youth, Australia has developed an approach to archival description that most of the rest of the world considers to be idiosyncratic at best. We in Australia are convinced that our strategies represent sound imple mentations of our profession's bedrock philosophies of provenance and respect des fonds. Nevertheless, the fact that we do pursue different implementation strategies has led many of our international colleagues to conclude that we have abandoned or at least debased those bedrock professional philosophies. In this paper I will explain the Australian approach to achieving intellectual control over records and explore why we believe this approach to be a useful means of achieving the archival mandate in the complex and ever changing world of the late twentieth century. The first thing I should do, however, is make it clear that the Australian approaches outlined in this paper are far from universally observed in Australia. The so-called Australian system is the product of the Archives of our national government. It has since been adopted by most State Government Archives and by a number of smaller archives. Nevertheless, a large number of archival programs in Australia are perfectly happy using the 'record group' approach to intellectual control and description. These include those historical manuscript and collecting programs, many of which are housed in library settings. Readers who are aware of the Australian system would associate it with the epochal writings of Peter Scott published in The American Archivist during the 1960s.2 Not surprisingly, the strategies outlined by Scott at this time were many years in the gestation. When the Commonwealth Archives Division was established in the late 1940s it had the distinct advantage of working with a clean slate. Although the Australian bureaucracy and many of its recordkeeping practices were based on the centuries-old model of the British civil service, our archival control systems had to be built from scratch. Of course at first the Archives Division was more pre-occupied with identifying records worthy of preservation, rescuing them and placing them in reasonable storage facilities. But by the mid-1950s the Division began to turn its attention to how best to bring these records under intellectual control. The Commonwealth Archivist, Ian Maclean, and his colleagues had, not sur prisingly, familiarised themselves with the writings of Sir Hilary Jenkinson and the model of archival practice developed by the Public Record Office in London. Early attempts at achieving intellectual control consisted of trying to impose the record group approach onto the records of the Australian Government. This thinking was reinforced in 1954 when T.R. Schellenberg of the U.S. National Archives was brought to Australia to advise on the development of our archival systems. Though Ian Maclean could hardly have been unaware of its existence, I am not sure exactly how familiar he was with the Dutch Manual. In any case, I suspect that the work of Muller Feith and Fruin would have been interpreted through a Jenkinsonian prism. While all governments experience administrative change, Australian politicians have elevated it to a fine art. The Australian bureaucratic landscape is an ever- changing one, with the constant reallocation of functions amongst an extremely unstable array of administrative units, government agencies and portfolio departments. While this trend has gathered pace as the century has grown older, complex administrative histories have always been a feature of Australian bureaucratic endeavour. When functions are reallocated the records are usually reallocated with them. It is this problem of multiple provenance that gave Maclean and his colleagues headaches when trying to apply the record group approach to intellectual control. Instinctively, they knew that complex administrative histories required assiduous archival documentation of the context of records creation. They continued with increasing difficulty to try to do this into the early 1960s when a young linguist by the name of Peter Scott was appointed to the Archives. In 1964 Scott came up with the radical suggestion of abandoning the record group as the locus of intel lectual control and instead adopting the function-based series as the means of controlling records.3 The 'series' system This focus on the record series led perhaps inevitably to Scott's strategies being referred to as 'the series system'. As Chris Hurley4 and others have since pointed out, however, it was not so much the focus on the series that was the defining feature of Scott's strategies, as it was his insistence on the need to separately document records description and administrative context. Series to Scott provided the most efficient vehicle for documenting records description. As such, series descriptions became free-floating entities that are connected as DE KWALITEIT VAN HET ARCHIEF EN HET ARCHIEFBEHEER 2 P. Scott, "The Record Group Concept: A Case for Abandonment", American Archivist 29 (1966), pp. 493-504. 134 ADRIAN CUNNINGHAM /DYNAMIC DESCRIPTIONS 3 M. Wagland, R. Kelly, "The Series System - A Revolution in Archival Control", in S. McKemmish, M. Piggott, eds., The Records Continuum. Ian Maclean and Australian Archives first fifty years (Clayton, 1994), pp. 131-149. 4 C. Hurley, "The Australian ('Series') System: An Exposition", in S. McKemmish, M. Piggott, eds., The Records Continuum. Ian Maclean and Australian Archives first fifty years (Clayton, 1994), pp. 150-172. 135

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Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 1999 | | pagina 69