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.

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 former New Zealand Government’s proposals for re-organising its National Archives were seen by records and information managers as a reduction in the Archives’ status and standing. However, the author, historian Dr. J. O. C. Phillips, acting head of the Archives’ managing department, the Heritage Group of the Department of Internal Affairs, argues that while the Archives’ statutory-regulatory power is valued, its role as history and heritage custodian is of equal importance.

Keeping up standards: a phrase that means many things to many people. To recordkeepers it is central to efficiency and expertise. In a 1998 presentation, Michael Hoyle, the manager of the Statutory-Regulatory Group of Archives New Zealand (formerly the National Archives of New Zealand) shows the relevance of recordkeeping standards to information management professionals. He identifies definitions, types of standards, standard setting organisations and shows how they may help improve recordkeeping.

Dr Michael Cullen, M.P., New Zealand Treasurer and Finance Minister, speaking before his and the Labour Party’s return to power, demands an end to the “absurd and destructive” actions of “lusty young intellectual barbarians”.

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.