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Content:
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Archives can be strange, confusing places for inexperienced
users. To the uninitiated, complex finding aids, archival metadata and access conditions can be perplexing barriers. Yet in Australia, national, state, organisational and community archives hold records of enormous value. For example, many of the estimated 500,000 Australian individuals who experienced institutional ‘care’ as children during the twentieth century – known as Forgotten
Australians and Former Child Migrants
– seek documents, photographs
and related records to help them
reconstruct their
personal narrative and identity.
Archival records may also be evidence of crimes or human rights abuses and can be
vital when seeking redress, or when making contributions to
formal inquiries. The Find
& Connect web resource
(http://www.findandconnect.gov.au),
funded by the Australian Commonwealth Government, is an attempt to utilise existing archival standards combined with new technologies to make these vital records more discoverable and understandable via a single, structured
online contextual information
network. Archivists, historians,
social workers and others
work as an interdisciplinary team to map the history
of out-of-home care in
all states and territories,
gather information on relevant collections, series
and records, answer questions
from users, and (where possible) provide support and advice to organisations working with care leavers
and their records through
workshops and regular communication.
In presenting this
paper, we seek to take this work
to the international archival community, to explore the conceptual underpinnings of archival practice, and to engage with the community
to foster awareness of the importance of these types of records.
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