required to descriptions of all the agencies of government that have contributed
to their existence.
Far from being an attack on the principle of provenance, Scott saw his approach
as being a more efficient means of documenting the true and often complex
nature of provenance and recordkeeping systems than is possible using the
record group approach. It is the Australian view that provenance cannot be
reduced to a simple one-to-one relationship between records creator and records.
The simplistic view of provenance, which is embodied in the records group
approach to archival description, to us represents a debasement of the archival
principle of respect des fonds. To many of us in Australia, the record group is more
a case of disrespect des fonds! Records can and more often than not do have
multiple provenancial relationships, either simultaneously or successively.
It behooves us as archivists to design descriptive systems that reflect the dynamic
and complex realities of recordkeeping.
In essence the Australian system consists of two inter-related component parts:
(1) Context control, which is achieved by the identification and registration of
records creating and other ambient entities and the documentation of the
administrative and biographical histories of those entities, their functional
responsibilities and their relationships with each other and with the
recordkeeping systems they maintain(ed); and
(2) Records control, which is achieved by the identification, registration and
documentation of record series and/or the items that make up those series.
In the Australian system the contextual entities that need to be documented and
linked to descriptions of records include individuals, families, organisations,
project teams, government agencies and portfolios, governments themselves,
functions and activities. It is the complex web of dynamic relationships between
these various entities that underpin the transactions that cause the creation of
records. It is therefore essential to capture documentation of these relationships
in order to provide the contextual knowledge necessary to understand the
content of the records themselves. In Australian continuum thinking records are
not seen as 'passive objects to be described retrospectively', but as agents of
action, 'active participants in business processes'.5
As can be seen, the Australian system constitutes a dynamic approach to the
intellectual control of records. Using this system any particular set of records
can be viewed simultaneously or successively through multiple contextual
prisms, thus mirroring the dynamic and contingent nature of records creation
itself. The structural elements of the system provide the conceptual and
documentary building blocks from which traditional or non-traditional finding
aids can be constructed as and when required.
Unlike traditional static bibliographic approaches to archival description, the
Australian system assumes that data inputs to a descriptive system may look very
different indeed to the outputs of that same system. The Australian view is that,
while it is vital for the semantics and syntax of the data inputs of an intellectual
control system to be standardised, it is not so crucial for the outputs to be
standardised. There is, in other words, room for flexibility and customisation at
the output end of intellectual control. Of course in recent years the advent of
computers has helped us to convert this theoretical possibility into an
implementation reality.
Post-custodialism and the records continuum
There is another centrally important feature of the Australian approach to the
intellectual control of records. Unlike traditional post-hoc approaches to
archival description that focus on the static description of non-current records,
the Australian approach can be and is used to achieve intellectual control over
all of the records, both current and non-current, in a recordkeeping domain.
Right from the earliest days of his appointment Ian Maclean was committed to
the pursuit of an integrated approach to managing all of the records of the
Australian government, not just the 'archival' remnants of records which have
been subjected to the so-called 'historical shunt'.
Under this philosophy of intellectual control, the custodial arrangements under
which records are held are no longer of great significance. Certainly it is
important to know where records are held at any one time, but they do not have
to be in archival custody for the Archives to have a strategic responsibility for
and interest in bringing them under intellectual control.
In the words of Canada's Terry Cook:
Scott's essential contribution was to break through (rather than simply
modify) not just the descriptive strait-jacket of the Schellenbergian record
group, but the whole mindset of the "physicality" of archives upon which most
archival thinking since the Dutch Manual had implicitly been based. In this
way, as is finally being acknowledged, Peter Scott is the founder of the
"postcustodial" revolution in world archival thinking. Although he worked in
a paper world, his insights are now especially relevant for archivists facing
electronic records, where -just as in Scott's system- the physicality of the
record has little importance compared to its multi-relational contexts of
creation and contemporary use.6
In recent years the holistic Australian approach to records control has come to
be referred to as 'continuum management'. Continuum management rejects any
suggestion that there should be a division between records management and
archives -it is all recordkeeping. With the advent of electronic records, the
advantages of this proactive and integrated approach to managing records have
become apparent to many recordkeeping experts outside of Australia. Without
DE KWALITEIT VAN HET ARCHIEF EN HET ARCHIEFBEHEER
5 B. Reed, "Metadata: Core Record or Core Business?", Archives and Manuscripts 25 (1997), pp. 218-241.
136
ADRIAN CUNNINGHAM /DYNAMIC DESCRIPTIONS
6 T. Cook, "What is Past is Prologue", Archivaria 43 (1996), p. 39 [reprinted in this volume].
137