An analysis, sometimes critical, of the challenges, problems and future for urban development archiving in the People’s Republic. Beijing’s Renmim University Archives College Associate Professor Dr Xiaomi An’s nation-wide survey.

The National Archives of Australia launched its digitisation on demand programme on April 11, 2001, to provide a growing client base with better access to its holdings of historic records without requiring people to travel sometimes great distances across that vast continent to visit the repositories in Canberra or the State capital. Within six months, the programme had half a million document images on line and was being overwhelmed by clients clamouring for more.

An Editorial published in the April 2000 edition of Archifacts, the bi-annual journal of the Archives and Records Association of New Zealand, and is reproduced with the kind permission of the Editor and writer, Dr Brad Patterson.

The historical emergence of information management in Germany and its crucial significance for the recordkeeping functions of the modern nation, by Marburg Archivschule Senior Lecturer Dr Nils Brübach.

Governance: The exercise of the delegated power of governing or managing corporate bodies, be they national or local government, commerce or non-profit organisations. The power is given by the people, the society created by and for the benefit of its members and operated within a firm structure of laws to balance individual liberty with social justice. Society’s potent defence against despotic bureaucracy: first-class record-keeping by a trustworthy authority. Victoria University of Wellington don James Traue presents the case against sub-ordination of the National Archives.

The campaign by the Archives and Records Association of New Zealand and the New Zealand Society of Genealogists to stop the merger of the National Archives of New Zealand (now “Archives New Zealand”) into a Government business unit, the Heritage Group, was featured in Wellington’s morning paper “The Dominion” in March 1998 after Editor Richard Long requested it from Michael Steemson, an adviser to the campaign. The 600-word feature argued that the status and importance of the Archives were slowly degenerating to that of a mere warehouse for historians.