Search results

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.

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 study is to investigate the incidence of disaster and how it affects access to records of the National Archives of South East, Nigeria. However, the specific objectives are to: identify the types of disasters that occur in the archives of South East, Nigeria; ascertain the frequency with which the disasters occur in the archives; determine the relationship between disaster and access to records of the archives; find out the disaster prevention measures adopted by the archives; find out the disaster response and recovery plans available in the archives; and make recommendations for effective disaster prevention and control measures for the archives.

The research design adopted for this study is the survey method. Individuals constituted the respondents of the study. This design assisted in gathering accurate data of the given issues and also guided in discussing the findings of the study. The researcher adopted one technique in data collection. Questionnaire was used for primary data collection. Questionnaire was used to collect data from the staff of the National Archives.

The findings show that the most prevalent disaster experienced in the archives is power failure. There are occurrences of other man-made disasters in the archives such as stealing, vandalism, fire outbreak and water leakages. The only natural disaster they acknowledged that occurs in the archives is lightening strike. The effect of this disaster was found to be enormous as attested to by 90.9 and 75 per cent respondents in Enugu and Owerri, respectively. The respondents do not agree that natural phenomena such as earthquake/tsunami, volcanic eruption and landslides do constitute threat to records of the archives.

The events of disaster, in whatever shape or frequency, impede access to records of the National Archives of South East, Nigeria. Most of the disasters that affect the archives are man-made, but with the recent happenings around the globe – the global climate change – it becomes imperative to focus attention on eventual occurrence of natural disasters in the archives. In prevention, response and recovery plans, it is important that consideration is given to all areas likely to be affected by the disaster.

The PICCH research project contributes to opening a dialogue between cultural heritage archives and users. Hence, the users are identified and their information needs, the search strategies they apply and the search challenges they experience are uncovered.

A combination of questionnaires and interviews is used for collection of data. Questionnaire data were collected from users of three different audiovisual archives. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with two user groups: (1) scholars searching information for research projects and (2) archivists who perform their own scholarly work and search information on behalf of others.

The questionnaire results show that the archive users mainly have an academic background. Hence, scholars and archivists constitute the target group for in-depth interviews. The interviews reveal that their information needs are multi-faceted and match the information need typology by Ingwersen. The scholars mainly apply collection-specific search strategies but have in common primarily doing keyword searching, which they typically plan in advance. The archivists do less planning owing to their knowledge of the collections. All interviewees demonstrate domain knowledge, archival intelligence and artefactual literacy in their use and mastering of the archives. The search challenges they experience can be characterised as search system complexity challenges, material challenges and metadata challenges.

The paper provides a rare insight into the complexity of the search situation of cultural heritage archives, and the users’ multi-facetted information needs and hence contributes to the dialogue between the archives and the users.

In many countries, there is a growing interest in cooperation among archives, libraries and museums. For the sake of the interested user it is important to make it easier to obtain information from the different institutions, and so to make a crossover strategy to give people access to their cultural heritage. The goal is to provide people with the opportunity to search material in archives, libraries and museums simultaneously. Consequently, it is necessary to try to create minimum standards for cataloguing and description with the starting point in the standards already accepted internationally. In Denmark there have been some interesting projects the objective of which has been to make it possible to search for material in several institutions at the same time. NOKS is one of these projects, it is an abbreviation for Nordjyllands Kulturhistoriske Søgebase, which is a database with material about the cultural history of the North of Jutland. The project involved nine institutions. The records from the institutions have been put together in one database, which can be reached via the Internet address www.noks.dk. The database consists of 115,000 records, among them 8,000 photos, including different types of material, printed material, books, leaflets, newspaper clippings, archives, museum items, etc.