Archival institutions the world over are battling to reinvent their traditional processes, practices and systems in order to deal with the scale, complexity and richness of contemporary digital records.

Come and join speakers from Archives New Zealand, the Public Record Office Victoria, State Records NSW and the University of Sydney, as well as prominent theorists Chris Hurley and Barbara Reed, to explore how archival processes and responsibilities can be reformulated to cope with the realities of the digital world.

Image: Luc Viator

The timing of this event is critical. There is no further time for reflection. Collective solutions to these archival challenges must be developed and implemented now before the problems become insurmountable.

Topics to be covered include:

• How we can go about recapturing the opportunities presented by Peter Scott’s original articulation of the series system
• What problems are those implementing digital archives encountering?
• How can archival description be scaled to generate context out of chaos?
• How can entities and relationships be defined to enable meaningful and flexible description to evolve through time?
• How should item level description be managed to incorporate information-rich business metadata?
• How can archivists collaborate better to develop cooperative solutions?
• Can the problem be dealt with before it occurs? Strategies for encouraging better description in the record creation environment

Help to reinvent tradition and register now to become part of this challenging but professionally important day.

• Where: ATP Innovations Seminar Room, National Innovation Centre,Australian Technology Park, Redfern (map and directions)
• When: Friday 21 October, 8:30am – 5:30pm
• Cost: $150; $130 for ASA members – including GST (covers the workshop, catering and celebratory drinks at the end of the day)

Payment:

Please register your interest in attending the workshop below. On receipt of your registration of interest we will email you with EFT payment details. Once we have received your payment we will forward an invoice to you, which will serve as confirmation of your place at the workshop. If you have any questions about the process, please contact Cassie on 0412 355 899.

Please note:

• Before attending the workshop, we would encourage you to dip into Cunningham (ed.) The Arrangement and Description of Archives Amid Administrative and Technological Change: Essays and Reflections By and About Peter Scott, Australian Society of Archivists, 2010, to refresh your understanding of many of the foundation principles that will be discussed on the day. It is available for purchase from the ASA, details here:  http://www.archivists.org.au/onlinestore/publications-hardcopy

With thanks to our sponsors ATP Innovations