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In the wake of the fourth industrial revolution, where most information is accessible online, archives should be visible online for them to fulfil their legislated mandate and facilitate access to information resources. The Covid-19 pandemic has further underscored the importance of online platforms in making archives accessible without the public having to visit archival institutions physically. The purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which public archival institutions of South Africa are visible online with the view to deepen their understanding of how archives promote themselves online.

The study employed content analysis to establish the online content of public archival institutions in South Africa. A google search was conducted using the names of the archival institutions as search terms. The top results obtained after the search were recorded for further analysis.

The findings suggest that public archival institutions in South Africa have limited online presence. Only the National Archives of South Africa had an active website with collections that are accessible online. Some provincial archives had websites hosted by their parent bodies while others had no websites at all. Only the Limpopo and Eastern Cape provincial archives had their Facebook pages in the top results. There were no signs of other social media sites in the top results.

The study concludes that public archival institutions are not visible online. All provincial archives need to have websites where they can be accessed. The use of social media platforms needs to be prioritised. In this fourth industrial revolution age, people communicate and interact online. Public archival institutions should therefore make it their primary mandate to take the archives to where the people are currently meeting.

Speicherverbund Nord is a print archiving cooperative of seven academic libraries from Northern Germany. Its scope is the shared archiving of print serials with multiple holdings. This article presents the history and key events from the start of the initiative till today and gives a report of the main questions and fundamental decisions and definitions that have been made during the process.

The approach of Speicherverbund Nord is to identify a common stock of journal titles and to assign one site each to be responsible of future archiving. The local capacities are exploited to establish a joint archiving environment.

Speicherverbund Nord is a pragmatic, not too complex cooperative for shared archiving. It has reached a stable routine operation since four years now and gains a small but steady output of archive commitments that is focused on key areas. Additional resources are not required.

The cooperation partner can share the loads of archiving, gain freedom for weeding out print stocks and implement a framework to identify and document archive titles. Foreign libraries can find and rely on the archiving commitments, too. With its efforts Speicherverbund Nord has come to be a kind of precursor for other archiving initiatives in Germany.

The cooperative is the first of its kind in Germany. As it is a regional initiative for Northern Germany, other regional initiatives can follow.

This paper aims to explore the role played by the National Archives of South Africa in human rights promotion and protection. The study examined the challenges that archivists encounter when undertaking archival functions, such as acquisition, appraisal and access provision, that contribute to forming documentary archives crucial for human rights promotion and protection.

A review of literature dealing with acquisition, appraisal and access was used in this research. It was supplemented with interviews.

This paper provides recommendations of benefits in the field of archives management with a focus on the areas of acquisition, appraisal and access. The transformational discourse in the jurisdiction of archives management challenges archival institutions to be active players in selecting historical and cultural archives’ significance that is significant in human rights protections. However, despite judicial requirements that recommend the importance of archives, there is evidence that archival functions such as appraisal, acquisition and access are not being fully used, resulting in national archives institutions that are subject to irregularities that contribute to an unbalanced archives collection.

The paper was limited only to the National Archives of South Africa.

The paper makes practical implications concerning the acquisition, appraisal and providing access to human rights records.

Sufficient funding resource allocation ought to be provided to advance human rights promotion.

This paper offers informed recommendations to address the challenges of acquisition, appraisal and access provision of archive materials. The availability of archives materials reinforces the community by aiding to protect legal rights and prevent human rights violations. It was, thus, necessary to establish whether the National Archives of South Africa is actively building the archives collections that are important for human rights promotion and protection.

This paper considers the sometimes serious and controversial political, legal, institutional and technological issues that were triggered by the mass transfer and copying of electronic presidential records by the Sixteenth President of the Republic of Korea (South Korea) at the end of his term of office.

During this administration, the Korean government made significant government‐wide recordkeeping innovations, mainly initiated and supported by the then President Roh Moo Hyun, and also supported by civilian professionals. The Public Records Management Act (PRMA) was revised, the Presidential Records Act (PRA) legislated and the National Archives of Korea tripled in staff size and made significant government records innovations. At the end of his term, the President copied all of his presidential records in electronic form and kept them for his own use, transferring the “authenticated” records to the National Archives. The National Archives subsequently charged his former secretaries with violation of the Presidential Records Act.

The paper summarizes the records issues to give further consideration to electronic records matters as well as dealing with politically sensitive records in the public archives. Can recordkeeping and politics be divorced? If so, how?

The paper provides insight into the political dimension of recordkeeping in the public, government context in Korea.

The Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (DFAIT), Government of Canada, through Shastri Indo‐Canadian Institute, encourages Indian scholars for Understanding Canada Faculty Research, Fellowships; the author visited Canada during March 2010 to study Canadian archival system, especially records management in archives in Ontario province; the driving rationale for the study was the realization that there existed very few or no archives and record management (ARM) programs in India. This study intends to report different types of ARM programs in Canada, with special reference to e‐records management, namely automation status, creation of virtual exhibits, preservation of digital images, metadata standard for e‐records, etc.

The author visited national, provincial and municipal archives and conducted unstructured interviews with archives staff/managers.

Records are considered as commodity and attempts to improve their management has necessitated a more integrated and controlled approach. In this study, it is noted that archivist and records managers have at present very little influence on policy implementation of archives and working under university librarian and less influence on decision making. All the university archives get a nominal amount from library budget. No separate budget for archives is available; modest budgets are allocated for rare book collection. The total archives concept in English Canada is based on the American system. The responsibility for collecting and copying its historical records fell to the government; with the so‐called convergence of technologies helping to fulfill new demands and rising expectations and to empower the end‐user. It was possible to establish very good relations with the archivists of these institutions and the author is keen to keep contact with them. It is expected that this study will serve as a building block to deeper examinations of broader issues such as the core competencies with respect to records management with special reference to e‐records management.

The prime objectives were to overview the current state of active and passive record keeping in the Government of Canada and identify the core competencies required to build effective record keeping infrastructures in the digital environment that has emerged in most government institutions. During a period of one month, the author was able to visit only selected archives in Toronto and Ottawa. The archives in other parts of Canada are not included in this study due to time limit.

The paper presents a study of the archival system in Canada and its role and contribution towards promoting a knowledge society in Canada.

Contrary to the development of digital libraries at Korean universities, which has been due to the progress of information technologies, university archives are in their early stages and are not fully using the digital environment. This paper aims to evaluate current trends and possible future directions of university archives in Korea via surveys (questionnaires) and interviews with university archives personnel.

Surveys (questionnaires) and interviews are made at 51 university archives in Korea. Questionnaires, based on university archives guidelines, include 27 questions in 6 categories: foundation principles, functions, process guidelines, facilities, acquisition and management, and access and services.

Basic foundation principles or process guidelines are not yet completely established. Administrative, preservation, and management functions are strong, but research and educational functions, and access and service functions are very weak. Use of information technologies and digital environment are poor also. Cooperation between internal and external institutions is not active. Future directions should address these weak points. Especially, information technologies can efficiently offer support for the development of university archives from the acquisition stage to the user services and preservation stages.

This investigation of current trends at university archives in Korea through questionnaires and interviews with staff members and archivists points to future directions for such archives, especially in the application of digital methods. The approach taken and suggestions made might be helpful for other university archives.

The research issues of digital preservation have apparently moved from how to set up the digital archives to on-going business models. The aim of this paper is to investigate the key factors for digital archives' success. This paper provides a business model for the sustainability of digital archives.

Both pricing strategies and business models related to digital archives are very important. From the point of archive preservation, how to preserve digital archives permanently and make them accessible are the most important research issues. This paper, based on a review of the academic literature, adopts the innovative pricing approach to develop the business models and pricing strategy.

The research defines the different needs at start-up versus the on-going operations for digital preservation. Considering digital archives as information goods, this study adopts the TRIZ method to establish a pricing strategy for digital preservation. It discusses the pricing strategy for digital preservation using an innovative method of creative problem-solving theory from the perspectives of the archives institutes, materials providers and consumers.

This study recommends the pricing strategies for the digital preservation programs and the government's price policy based on the TRIZ analysis method.

Providing access to holdings is central to the work of archives, particularly those institutions which are publicly funded. Recently, questions relating to access have assumed additional importance for archives and other information institutions. To address these concerns, institutions such as the National Archives of Canada have become more aggressive in promoting the use of their holdings. A significant component of this strategy involves the provision, through various means, of copied holdings and information about those holdings. While similar, there are important differences between interlending in libraries and similar activities in archival institutions. These differences stem from the unique nature of archival documents. The National Archives of Canada disseminates information about itself and its holdings, as well as copies of actual holdings, through several programmes. These programmes include inter‐institutional loan of copies, photocopying services, a programme diffusing copies to provincial archives, and a new initiative to provide access to such information at “decentralized access sites” across the country.

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a research project undertaken by Prosentient Systems and partially funded by the ALIA 2007 research study grant. The focus of the project was a proof‐of‐concept implementation of a Smart Client application for digital archiving of e‐journal subscriptions held by special libraries.

This research comprised a survey of libraries in the area of electronic journal archiving and software development research. The quantitative survey was distributed to 254 member libraries of the GratisNet and GLASS special library networks in Australia. Seven questions explored current practice in e‐journal archiving. In total, 164 responses were received, of which only seven indicated current progress toward e‐journal archiving. Based on the survey results, the second phase of the project comprised software development research.

The research outcomes indicate that a cross‐platform “Smart Client” approach to e‐journal archiving is achievable and the presentation will review architectural design techniques that support cross‐platform deployment and simple installation using open source smart client tools.

The transition to e‐journal subscriptions has not been matched with attention to methods for local archiving of e‐journal subscriptions. This research demonstrates the feasibility of simple solutions suitable for special libraries to implement local e‐journal archives.

This research presents an innovative approach to e‐journal archiving for special libraries. The approach differs from current, peer‐to‐peer approach by implementing a central metadata server and a simple easy to deploy desktop archiving agent. Furthermore, limitations imposed by copyright restrictions are the principal impediment that libraries face in implementing e‐journal archives, and the centralised metadata approach can help libraries distinguish journals for which local archiving is allowed.

The purpose of this research is to show how the self‐archiving of journal papers is a major step towards providing open access to research. However, copyright transfer agreements (CTAs) that are signed by an author prior to publication often indicate whether, and in what form, self‐archiving is allowed. The SHERPA/RoMEO database enables easy access to publishers' policies in this area and uses a colour‐coding scheme to classify publishers according to their self‐archiving status. The database is currently being redeveloped and renamed the Copyright Knowledge Bank. However, it will still assign a colour to individual publishers indicating whether pre‐prints can be self‐archived (yellow), post‐prints can be self‐archived (blue), both pre‐print and post‐print can be archived (green) or neither (white). The nature of CTAs means that these decisions are rarely as straightforward as they may seem, and this paper describes the thinking and considerations that were used in assigning these colours in the light of the underlying principles and definitions of open access.

Detailed analysis of a large number of CTAs led to the development of controlled vocabulary of terms which was carefully analysed to determine how these terms equate to the definition and “spirit” of open access.

The paper reports on how conditions outlined by publishers in their CTAs, such as how or where a paper can be self‐archived, affect the assignment of a self‐archiving colour to the publisher.

The colour assignment is widely used by authors and repository administrators in determining whether academic papers can be self‐archived. This paper provides a starting‐point for further discussion and development of publisher classification in the open access environment.