Improving the Archiving of Records in the Out-of-home Care Sector

Abstract

Senate Inquiries into the lives of people who grew up in care, highly critical Ombudsman reports, and advocacy groups for recent and past “care leavers” draw attention to the significance of the records for children growing up in out-of-home care. This article reports on a project in which an interdisciplinary team of social workers, archivists, and historians worked together with 12 community-sector (nongovernment) organisations to look at the question of how to improve the management of the records for people with experience of out-of-home care. A Self Assessment Tool was developed and deployed at two points in time to provide feedback to organisations about the quality of their record-keeping practices. Clear improvements could be documented over a 2-year period in all 12 of the organisations involved.

参议院对管护中成长者生活的调查、高度批评性的奥姆巴兹曼报告、以及近年及往年 “管护出走者”促进群体等等，使人们注意到离家出走儿童记录的重要性。一个包括社会工作者、档案工作者和历史学者的跨学科团队与12个社区—部门（非政府）组织联手进行调查，以期改善离家出走者记录的管理。在两个时间点上推出了一个自我评估工具，为这些组织提供关于记录保管质量的反馈。所有12个组织在两年内都证明有明显的改进。

Keywords:

• Archiving
• Record-keeping
• Out-of-home Care
• Identity
• Action Research
• Forgotten Australians