School archivists from across Australia gathered at Newington last Monday, 17 October for the national meeting of the School Archives Special Interest Group of the Australian Society of Archivists.

The meeting was a combination of professional development and networking opportunity. Following a gracious and amusing welcome from the Headmaster, Dr David Mulford, the thirty-five archivists grappled with two of the major issues facing archives programs in schools: 1. Which records do we keep and for how long? and 2. How can we best collaborate to meet the challenges of record keeping in the digital world?

Schools are complex organisations which create a vast range of records and information in a wide range of forms. Determining which to preserve indefinitely as archives is, naturally, a central part of the archivist’s role. But there are many factors — legal, accountability and other evidential requirements, along with practical business needs — that affect how long the many classes of a school’s records and information have to be kept. Identifying these myriad records retention requirements, and implementing them in systems and practice, is an essential component in the effective management of a school’s records and information. After all, how can any organisation claim to manage its records and information effectively if it doesn’t even know how long to keep them? The workshop at the School Archives meeting was an early step in a project to develop a new records retention schedule for non-government schools, which will help all our schools to manage their records and information better.

Most of the records and information in schools, as in any organisation today, are generated in digital form in the digital environment. This presents great opportunities, but also serious challenges for the long-term management of born digital records, such as how to transcend multiple generations of technological change to ensure that the records remain accessible and trustworthy decades after their creation. The School Archives meeting addressed just one of the dimensions of this challenge: how best to collaborate with other stakeholders, in ICT and elsewhere, to ‘future proof’ our schools’ records and information assets.

The School Archives meeting was held in conjunction with the Australian Society of Archivists’ annual conference, held this year at Parramatta. Its theme of ‘Forging links: people, systems, archives’ provided the perfect opportunity for the school archivists to continue to explore these and other themes with our colleagues working in other sectors of society.

Mr David Roberts
College Archivist