Lessons from Down Under: Records Management in Australia.

• Author: SLETTEN, LAURIE

Records managers in Australia face many of the same issues and challenges as do their counterparts in the United States. In this article, a North American records manager currently teaching in Australia reflects on the differences yet similarities in records management practice in the United States and Australia. This article focuses on three areas for comparison: the records continuum, which is the prevalent records management theory professed in Australia; the day-to-day issues facing the records manager in Australia; and electronic records management issues.

Things are different in Australia. Actually, they are different and yet the same. The terms and labels used to identify items and even processes may be different, but the items and processes tend to be familiar. This is especially true with records management practices.

Records management in Australia is very similar to records management in the United States. Upon researching records management in Australia it becomes abundantly clear that there is a very progressive and aggressive approach to recordkeeping practices in that country. Australians take recordkeeping very seriously and in some ways, generally speaking, have better control over their records than do records managers in the United States.

A clearer understanding of the differences and similarities is possible by focusing on three basic areas: the prevalent records management theory professed in Australia, the day-to-day issues facing the records manager in Australia, and electronic records management issues in Australia.

The Records Continuum

The records continuum is the prevalent records management theory professed in Australia. The Australian Standard for Records Management, hereafter referred to as AS4390, defines the records continuum as "The whole extent of a record's existence. Refers to a consistent and coherent regime of management processes from the time of the creation of records (and before creation, in the design of recordkeeping systems) through to the preservation and use of records as archives." (AS4390.1[4.22])

The Australian continuum model is just beginning to gain momentum. Until 1996, most official documents regarding records management principles and practices discussed the records life cycle approach. Steering the continuum into the prevailing model position are some very dynamic theorists: Monash University's Frank Upward, Sue McKemmish, and Barbara Reed; and their colleagues, David Roberts from the Archives Authority of New South Wales, and Chris Hurley, acting Director and Chief Archivist of the National Archives of New Zealand. As a result of these individuals' writings and teachings, the continuum has been the records management model adapted by the National Archives of Australia and AS4390.

These theorists have a very different view of the life cycle concept. They believe that in the life cycle model, records are managed in very separate and distinct, somewhat systematic, stages that end with disposition. The records go from stage to stage, almost as if in some jerky, assembly-line like, syncopated rhythm, until they come to the disposition stage, at which time they are either destroyed or transferred to an archives. Further, they contend that the life cycle model suggests that archival records are no longer managed in the records management arena once they hit the door of the archives.

This misinterpretation of the life cycle theory can be easily understood when one reviews the definition put forth in the book Information and Records Management: Document Based Information Systems. In this book, authors Mary Robek, Gerald Brown, and David Stephens defined the records management life cycle thusly: "Most records are of temporary value; that is, like most organizational assets, their value for business purposes tends to decline as time passes and, at some point, they become useless and may be discarded.... If it is to be effective, a records management program must apply appropriate controls to records during each of the five major stages of the life cycle of information."

"A new road map for electronic recordkeeping," is how Upward described the records continuum in his unpublished paper "Applying the Records Continuum to Electronic Recordkeeping: Terms and Concepts for a Base Structural Model." In the paper he explained the continuum as follows: "A continuum approach contains the premise that the way things are formed is the way things are, unlike a life-cycle approach which assumes that entities go through a series of stages. A continuum involves looking at layers of development. The archives is the archive, is the record, is the document. The document can be the record, can be the archive, can be the archives.

Records do not move in distinct stages in the continuum model. Records can be in several of the four dimensions and an archival record is an archival record regardless in which dimension the records may be. The four dimensions are document creation, capturing documents as records, organizing memory, and...