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

Periodiekviewer Koninklijke Vereniging van Archivarissen

Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 1999 | | pagina 70