Four months into his new role as head of the National Archives of Australia (NAA), Simon Froude has a big task ahead. Budget and staffing constraints, compounded by a growing public demand for the institution’s services, meant processing blowouts and pressure to become more efficient with fewer resources.
“Part of our job is to make sure that this [official government] material is there forever, and so we have to do that to the best of our abilities and our funding resources,” Froude told The Mandarin.
“Nearly everything we do is collection-focused, either preserving the collection, or how we can provide better access to the collection — both physical and digital.”
The Adelaide-based public servant previously led State Records in South Australia. The main difference between a state or federal archive is simply a matter of jurisdiction with its own legislative mandate, Froude explained.
“The delineation really is around who made the records, and whose records they are. If they are commonwealth records, then they fall under our jurisdiction. If they are state government records or local government records, they will fall under the [respective] state or territory archives,” the director-general said.
“The National Archives has the largest collection of records of any of the archives. In terms of importance and relevance though, I don’t think we’re any more important because each archive tells a really important part of the history and the jigsaw that makes up Australia,” he said.
Froude’s five-year appointment coincided with an uncertain time for the archives. It had emerged from the dark cloud of chronic underfunding and some blistering rebukes in senate estimates last year.
The last government took 18 months to respond to a 2019 review of the NAA by former Finance secretary David Tune, and had finally announced it agreed to 14 of 20 urgent recommendations. The review exposed a mountain of challenges for the underfunded archives, which saw the NAA struggle to fulfil its mandate and to invest in the systems it needs in the digital age to meet this mandate.
“In general, the archives has managed its resources effectively and efficiently. It has done this by reducing staff numbers to stay within its budget,” the Tune report said.
“However, this approach is no longer sustainable. The growing backlog of access requests leaves the National Archives at risk of operational and reputational damage and unable to proceed with necessary reforms, including the digital archive, improved cyber security, and the preservation and digitisation of records.”
From investing in fit-for-purpose cybersecurity measures, to preserving a cache of tens of thousands of deteriorating audiovisual items, political masters branded the urgent reform needs of the archives a “significant task”.
Under mounting pressure, and with a vocal public campaign to save the NAA, the Coalition government committed $67.7 million to the preservation of at-risk records. The money was also put toward boosting staff and capability to address the backlog of access applications for records, and provide improved digitisation on-demand services.
The director-general said he had joined a team that was well-managed and dedicated to its work. He reflected that while most newcomers to a position like his often had to contend with cultural transformation goals or an ambitious operational change process, much of that groundwork had been done at the NAA before he stepped foot in his main headquarters in Canberra.
“The organisation itself knew the things that it needed to do. They had that awareness, and they’d started to do that sort of work,” Froude said.
“A really good example of that is around the digitisation of records that are at risk — not necessarily some of the paper records, but more predominantly audiovisual material, which is at risk because of the format that it’s on.
“The decay in tapes and things like that can slow things down and you can’t get that material back,” he explained, suggesting the perennial challenge for the archival sector was deciding what records should take precedence over others for their cultural value and be prioritised.
The NAA’s collection includes archives that need to be digitised, such as paper-based files, maps and plans, photographs, motion picture films, magnetic audio-visual tapes, digital files, and objects.
Most at risk of deterioration include magnetic tape audio-visual records and photographic and film records, particularly those on nitrate and acetate film.
The key for the NAA is digitising materials faster than the rate the archives are decaying.
“One of the basic tenets of what an archive exists for is preserving history and our memory so that people can then tell their stories,” Froude said.
“There is an element of triage — we look at the material that is at high risk, and that original material can be put in cold storage at our preservation facility in Mitchell so that it actually prevents the decay from happening further.
“For us, it’s not just a case of taking historical material, and putting it into a warehouse on a box on a shelf. It needs more than that — it needs ongoing treatment.”
The NAA’s facility in Mitchell has been operating for about five years now and the majority of the archive’s Canberra staff are based there. Froude says that along with cold storage, digital preservation tools and technologies to migrate information saved on CDs and floppy disks all have an important part to play in effective archive management.
“Paper records are, interestingly enough, a format that will survive a long time, without a lot of hands-on help,” he said.
When asked if the NAA’s preservation triage approach may mean some material is lost forever, the director-general insisted this was not the case.
Under the Archives Act 1983 the main purpose of the archives is to identify the archival resources of the commonwealth; preserve and make this information publicly available; and oversee commonwealth record-keeping by determining standards and providing advice to federal institutions.
“All of the material that we have in our collection is here because it has an importance to the history of the country,” Froude said.
“Does that mean that there is some material that is more valuable than others? Probably. Does it mean that we shelve the preservation of some material? No.
“We might put material to the front of the queue because of the timeframe that it needs to be done within, and because the risk is greater at that particular time. But we would never shelve or put off the preservation of material,” he said.
There has been a change in government since Froude took on his new post, and the NAA now sits under the arts portfolio. The shift out of the attorney-general’s patch means the archives can align with the work of other cultural institutions, such as galleries and museums, to tell the nation’s history.
“Archival institutions work together and can help tell a story — so can other cultural institutions,” Froude said.
In Froude’s view, the reset is also an opportunity to encourage the wider community to access a more cohesive history about themselves and the nation which may otherwise be difficult to learn about.
“Traditionally, in the paper world, people have only been able to access an archive if they travelled to a capital city; they go to the archive, they visit the research centre, and they access the material there. It has been very restrictive,” he said.
“But now, with the advent of digital technologies, with the use of social media, and a whole plethora of other things, archives have an opportunity to actually put that material out there, right in people’s hands on a day-to-day basis if they want it.
“That’s something that we need to do, we need to be more proactive in our engagement with the community at large.”
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