Eternity revisited: in pursuit of a national documentation strategy and a national archival system

  • Adrian Cunningham
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2014.911678

Abstract

As I sit down to write this thought piece in January 2014, our Canadian colleagues are preparing for a Canadian Archives Summit with the enviable title ‘Towards a New Blueprint for Canada’s Recorded Memory’.1 To me the most interesting word in this title is the word ‘new’. While the Canadian summit has been organised in response to the crisis associated with the removal of federal funding for their National Archival Development Program, Australians can nevertheless only look with wonder at another Commonwealth country with a federal system of government that has the luxury of an existing national blueprint for recorded memory – for surely one cannot create a ‘new’ blueprint if an old one does not already exist.

Author Biography

Adrian Cunningham

Adrian Cunningham is the Director of Digital Archives & Government Recordkeeping at Queensland State Archives, where he has worked since 2011. Before that he worked at the National Archives of Australia (NAA) from 1998 to 2011, where he held a variety of positions including oversight of the NAA’s collaborations with government, industry, professional and international partners – most particularly on matters associated with digital recordkeeping and other modern recordkeeping initiatives. Adrian was Secretary of the International Council on Archives (ICA) Committee on Descriptive Standards (2002–2004), and was Treasurer of the Pacific Regional Branch of the ICA (2003–2011) and Convenor of the Australian Society of Archivists Descriptive Standards Committee. Before joining the NAA he worked for many years as a private records archivist/librarian at the National Library of Australia, the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau and the State Library of New South Wales. Adrian was President of the Australian Society of Archivists (1998–2000) and was inducted as a Fellow of the Society in 2007. He was awarded the Emmett Leahy Award for contributions to records management in September 2010.

Published
2014-07-30
How to Cite
Cunningham A. (2014) “Eternity revisited: in pursuit of a national documentation strategy and a national archival system”, Archives & Manuscripts, 42(2), pp. 165-170. doi: 10.1080/01576895.2014.911678.
Issue
Vol 42 No 2 (2014): Special Issue: Reinventing Archival Methods
Section
Reflection articles

From 2022 (Volume 50) authors contributing to Archives & Manuscripts agree to publish their work under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. Authors retain copyright of their work, with first publication rights granted to A&M.