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Archives and Societal Provenance: Australian essays

Michael Piggott, Independent archives scholar, Australia

Chandos Information Professional Series

 - presents material from a life’s career working and thinking about archives and records and their multiple relationships with history, biography, culture and society
 - the first book to focus specifically on the Australian archival scene
 - covers a wide variety of themes, including: the theoretical concept of the records continuum; census records destruction; Prime Ministerial Libraries; and the documentation of war
 - challenges Western conceptions of the written archival document
 - calls on archivists to reconsider the sharp divide between the cognitive record of oral cultures and First World privileging of the inscribed externalized record

Records and archival arrangements in Australia are globally relevant because Australia’s indigenous people represent the oldest living culture in the world, and because modern Australia is an ex-colonial society now heavily multicultural in outlook. Archives and Societal Provenance explores this distinctiveness using the theoretical concept of societal provenance as propounded by Canadian archival scholars led by Dr Tom Nesmith. The book’s seventeen essays blend new writing and re-workings of earlier work, comprising the fi rst text to apply a societal provenance perspective to a national setting.

After a prologue by Professor Michael Moss entitled A prologue to the afterlife, this title consists of four sections. The first considers historical themes in Australian recordkeeping. The second covers some of the institutions which make the Australian archival story distinctive, such as the Australian War Memorial and prime ministerial libraries. The third discusses the formation of archives. The fourth and final part explores debates surrounding archives in Australia. The book concludes by considering the notion of an archival afterlife.

Readership: All those interested in libraries, recordkeeping, and archives, and their cultural background and relevance.

£57.75 / US$100.00 / €70.00

An e-book version of this title is available to purchase as part of a Collection or Pick n Mix. Visit Chandos Publishing Online

About the author

Michael Piggott is a consultant and independent scholar. He is a former Australian archivist with 37 years of experience as an archival practitioner and manager. His career included appointments at the National Library of Australia, the Australian War Memorial, the National Archives of Australia and the University of Melbourne. He has been active in the Australian Society of Archivists since its inception in 1975 and has produced scholarly guides to collections, and published widely on archival history and education, including personal papers and diaries. His latest refereed work was an invited paper for the inaugural issue of Grainger Studies: An interdisciplinary journal. In 2010 he was invited to become an Honorary Associate of the National Museum of Australia’s Centre for Historical Research, and an Honorary Member of the Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics, Monash University.

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Contents

PART 1 HISTORY
PART 2 INSTITUTIONS
PART 3 FORMATION
PART 4 DEBATES

Introduction: societal provenance
 - Terroir, culture and the individual
 - The aura of societal provenance
 - Australia and the Australian people
 - Other terminology
 - Applying societal provenance
 - Notes

PART 1 HISTORY

Themes in Australian recordkeeping, 1788–2010
 - British recordkeeping legacy
 - The governing machinery
 - Immigrant nation
 - The ordinary Australian: free immigrants and soldiers
 - Conclusion
 - Notes

Schellenberg in Australia: meaning and precedent
 - Assessing Schellenberg’s visit
 - Impact on the Paton Inquiry, and on Schellenberg
 - Political use
 - Cultural cringe
 - Impact of later visitors
 - Notes

Archives: an indispensable resource for Australian historians?
 - The three-stage discovery model
 - Just how important are archives?
 - The Australian archives–history nexus
 - In summary
 - Notes

The file on H

PART 2 INSTITUTIONS

Libraries and archives: from subordination to partnership
 - The setting – the 1950s
 - Schellenberg and the Paton Inquiry
 - Librarians’ guest, archivists’ hope
 - National Library Inquiry Committee
 - Inquiry membership
 - The inquiry supports separation
 - The arguments
 - Other later developments
 - Notes

Making sense of prime ministerial libraries
 - Meanings
 - Benefits
 - Challenges
 - Conclusion
 - Notes

War, sacred archiving and C.E.W. Bean
 - The setting
 - Archives
 - What it all meant
 - Notes

PART 3 FORMATION

Saving the statistics, destroying the census
 - Conducting the census
 - Confidentiality
 - The current debate
 - Supporting destruction
 - The case for retention
 - Claim and counter-claim
 - The independent inquiry
 - Reflections
 - Notes

Documenting Australian business: invisible hand or centrally planned?
 - Handicaps and solutions
 - Conditioning factors
 - Notes

Appraisal ‘firsts’ in twenty-first-century Australia
 - Trust and Technology
 - Appraising census forms
 - Business archives
 - Australian Society of Archivists
 - In summary
 - Notes

PART 4 DEBATES

Two cheers for the records continuum
 - The early to mid-1990s
 - Monash University
 - Frank Upward
 - The Australian audience
 - Abstractions, words and diagrams
 - Accolades and assessments
 - The inevitable limits of continuum theory
 - Notes

Recordkeeping and recordari: listening to Percy Grainger
 - Percy Grainger
 - Rose Grainger
 - The recordkeeper
 - Finding an archives host
 - A convenient form of artificial memory
 - The Remembrancer
 - Rich archive, wretched memory
 - Memory-dependent recordkeeping
 - Notes

Alchemist magpies? Collecting archivists and their critics Historian friends
 - Historian friends
 - Sir Hilary Jenkinson
 - Chris Hurley
 - Richard Cox
 - A partial rejoinder
 - The collecting archivist
 - The results of collecting: it hardly matters
 - The results of collecting: it matters
 - Notes

The poverty of Australia’s recordkeeping history
 - Acquisition
 - Destruction
 - Problems with traditional history
 - Criticism 1: it starts only in 1788
 - Criticism 2: a dated notion of what archives are and what archivists do
 - Criticism 3: the neglect of recordkeeping systems history
 - Criticism 4: the absence of a history of the record
 - Conclusion
 - Notes

Acknowledging Indigenous recordkeeping
 - Definitions
 - The need for new definitions
 - Tanderrum
 - Message sticks
 - Cognitive records, Dreaming archives
 - Towards an inclusive Australian archival science
 - Notes