Archives Office of Tasmania : Brief guide 022

Brief Guide 22: records arrangement

Archival material is inherently different from other forms of documentation such as printed, published materials found in libraries and requires an understanding of its arrangement, and methods of control and retrieval, before its full potential for research may be appreciated and utilised. It is important to keep in mind that archival records were created as part of a contemporary process being undertaken by an organisation or an individual, and were not created with a view to possible future research use. They are however evidence of the process whether it be government policy development, taking minutes of a meeting, or financial transactions

These notes are intended to provide a brief summary of the general principles and practices followed in archives work.

General Principles of Archival Arrangement

Archival institutions aim to respect and preserve the integrity and evidentiary value of the records they hold, and, to achieve this end, archives are normally maintained in the order or arrangement which they originally had in the office that produced them.

In approaching archives the researcher first needs to identify the particular organisations or offices (agencies) which are likely to have dealt with matters or had the functional responsibility relevant to the topic being researched. The records of each of these organisations or offices will then need to be examined for information on the particular topic.

As a practical example this would mean that if the topic of research was the uses of the site previously known as St. Johns Park, New Town records of the following government agencies may contain useful information - Colonial Secretary's Office, Charitable Grants Department, Orphan Schools, Social Welfare Department, Health Services Department, Treasury Department, Public Works Department, Lands Department. This list is not comprehensive. In most cases this research would involve the use of indexes and registers created by the different agencies as there is no overall detailed index to the content of records held in the Archives Office.

Archival Description

There are three main ‘components’ used in the Archives Office descriptive system.

Agency: the entity which undertook the functions and activities which gave rise to any particular records This could be a government Minister, a government agency or authority, a non-government organisation, or an individual. Information about the record creating agency provides the vital description of the context within which the records are made and kept and is therefore essential for an understanding of the content of the record.

Series: is an accumulation of records which derive from the same recordkeeping activity or process. The records which comprise a series usually have some sort of coherent relationship to each other.

Item: is a sub-unit of a series which can be coherently and consistently identified as a separate unit to other similar units in the series. It may be, for example, a file, volume, photograph, film, document, plan, digital image It is generally the smallest unit which has been allocated an identifying code within the Archives Office’s control system.

The descriptive information which surrounds these records provides both an aid to the retrieval of specific records as well as maintaining the attributes which make it a record in the first place.

Agencies, series, and items are registered into the system, allocated identifying codes and described both individually as well as through their relationships to other elements in the system.

The Tasmanian Archives Online system (TAO) contains the above descriptive information based on the ‘agency’, ‘series’, ‘item’ components. It can be searched at any of these components or across them all. Some of the elements that are included are the name/description of the component, its date range, its relationship to other components, its form of arrangement (where applicable), and other contextual information. The TAO is available on the Archives Office website and also in the Archives Office search room. A paper version of the system is available in the search room.

The Archives Office has also produced a range of guides and indexes which assist in the understanding and retrieval of the archival holdings.