Jane Prentice (Ryan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I wish to place on the record my appreciation to the coalition and the House of Representatives for giving me the privilege of serving as their representative on the National Archives of Australia Advisory Council. As I have said before in this place, the National Archives is, indeed, one of our best kept secrets. I encourage all members to act to rectify this by promoting its role and activities to their constituents.

The National Archives is in reality the memory of our nation, collecting and preserving Australian government records that reflect our history and identity. Its collection traces events and decisions that have shaped the nation and the lives of Australians. As well as preserving our history, the National Archives plays a key role in helping to ensure the Australian government and its departments are effective and accountable to the people.

A highlight for the National Archives in the last financial year was hosting the very successful International Council on Archives Congress in Brisbane in August 2012. I pay tribute to former council member Aladin Rahemtula and now Attorney-General Senator George Brandis, who had the foresight to bid for this event during the Howard government. It is reasonable to state that one of the reasons for our successful bid is that Australia is one of the world's leaders in the digitising of records. Indeed, we now have more than 25 million digitised pages loaded to the Archives collection database RecordSearch. You can understand just how important it is to digitise our records going forward when you look at the 2.57 shelf-kilometres of records transferred from government agencies to Archives during the 2011-12 period alone. To quote from the annual report:

The Archives places great value on its international leadership and collaboration with other national archives in the Asian region. In the recent past the Archives has had memoranda of understanding with the National Archives of Korea and Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia, allowing for the exchange of ideas, knowledge and training. The Archives has hosted visiting delegations from these institutions and Archives staff have provided professional development in Korea and Indonesia. The Archives undertakes similar activity in countries where there is no memorandum of understanding in places such as Japan, China and Singapore. In August 2012 the Archives hosted representatives from the national archives of Singapore, Japan, China and Macau at meetings to discuss common operating challenges.

During the last financial year the Archives continued to embrace technology to provide users with new and innovative ways to access and interact with the national archival collection. Significant achievements during this time included more than 3.6 million visits to their websites and over 206,000 people visiting their exhibitions or attending their public events; more than 6.3 million requests for records from the Archives’ collection made online; announcement of the Transition to Digital 2015 strategy, where records created digitally after 2015 can only be transferred to the Archives in digital format; proceeding to establish the National Archives Preservation Facility; and the Design 29: creating a capital exhibition, which featured original entries from the 1911 federal capital city design competition and was the Archives’ flagship initiative for the centenary of Canberra celebrations. The exhibition was also enhanced by an augmented-reality application. The app, loaded onto an iPad, supplemented and provided extra layers of meaning to the designs on display. Other achievements included greatly increased engagement and collaboration in the online sphere, including the Destination: Australia, SODA and ArcHIVE websites; establishment of the Indigenous Services Unit to assist Indigenous Australians to access the national archival collection; and enhancements to the display area at the national office, including the 'Banned' display of censored material from the mid-20th century—some of it is quite tame by today's standards; others are still quite racy.

Overall, it was a very active and successful year for National Archives. During 2012-13 we increased our holdings by 1.75 kilometres of records, including 11,168 items of audiovisual content. Our digital archive increased by more than 61 terabytes. Two of our publications were acknowledged with prestigious Mander Jones awards: the Digital Continuity Plan, produced to help Australian government agencies and other businesses keep digital information for the future; and a 300-page research guide, by author Ted Ling, to Northern Territory archival records. Both publications can be downloaded from our website free of charge.

I would also to take this opportunity to congratulate Mr David Fricker, the Director-General of the National Archives, who has been elected the next President of the International Council on Archives, the highest post in the ICA. It is the first time for an Australian. David takes up this prestigious four-year role in October this year. As our chairman, the Hon. Dr John Bannon, said:

While this is an honour for the National Archives of Australia and a tribute to its international reputation, it also recognises the high regard in which David Fricker is held by our archival partners and their acknowledgement of his efforts to strengthen those partnerships.

David himself modestly commented that his election is:

… recognition of the key role Australia plays in the international archival community and, in particular, our partnerships with Asian archival institutions

The annual report also says:

On 11 January 2013 the Governor-General issued the Letters Patent and Terms of Reference for the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The Archives subsequently issued a disposal freeze to all Australian Government agencies on records that may be required in evidence by the Royal Commission. This will ensure that relevant records are retained and protected, and therefore available if required. While Australian Government agencies are not expected to hold large numbers of case files, they are likely to hold relevant policy and administrative records. Our disposal freeze also provides a useful model for state and territory governments and the not-for profit and private sectors, which may hold case files relevant to the Royal Commission.

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With 98.5 per cent of people now connecting with our collection online [the National Archive] continue to change how we engage and socialise the archive through expanded websites, blogs, social media forums and innovative in-gallery experiences to facilitate expanded access to the records. For the second year we sponsored the national GovHack event, challenging talented programmers to imagine and build new uses for our online collection data. This year, the dataset released was our Passenger Arrivals Index.

The winners of our Digital Humanities prize was the Brisbane-based group Hack the Evening for their project ‘One, but many’. Hack the Evening combined the index with Australian Bureau of Statistics historical migration data, creating an application to help users learn more about Australia’s migration history. The application used a virtual map to show migration departures from ports around the world from 1921 to 1949. Using additional video footage and Wikipedia information, the group aimed to show what events might have influenced migration patterns.

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From 2014 to 2018 Australia will be commemorating the centenary of our nation’s involvement in World War I. The Archives holds a wide range of defence and war-related records and, as part of the centenary program, we aim to encourage Australians to engage with them through a range of projects.

The Department of Veterans’ Affairs has provided funding to list and digitise a sample of World War I repatriation records of servicemen and women who set sail from Albany on the first convoy in November 1914.

Other plans include our new interactive website Discovering Anzacs, an Anzac centenary exhibition site (known as the 'exhibition-in-a-box') and other online education resources. This will provide high-quality interpreted content that schools and community groups can use for their own centenary projects. We are also part of a project to help Indigenous Australians find service records of their families.

At this time of the Centenary of Anzac and unprecedented interest in family history, I encourage all members to promote the wonderful resources of the National Archives and the many exciting and interesting displays and exhibitions they undertake.