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.
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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.
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