Last year, Marian Hoy, one of the leading lights of the Australian archival profession, passed away. I cannot claim to have known Marian particularly well, but whenever I spoke with her at conferences and other professional events, I always valued the encouragement she provided me with as a young professional working in archives. Marian’s life, legacy and achievements, particularly in archival education and mentoring, are celebrated in Sigrid McCausland’s obituary, which opens this issue of the journal.
In ‘Archiving the Feminist Self: Reflections on the Personal Papers of Merle Thornton’, Margaret Henderson explores the way in which the divide between the public and private plays out in the process of turning a feminist activist’s records into an archival collection. Henderson reflects on the tensions inherent in a project that transforms a living subject’s records into a stable, institutionalised archival collection. The article offers a thoughtful contribution to the issue of archiving the feminist self, both as an insight into the formation and transformation of one such feminist archive, but also the contradictions associated with removing the personal from archives documenting an activist’s life, who sought to challenge many of the distinctions between the public and private that simultaneously restricted women to the domestic sphere and devalued the significance of that sphere.
Jinfang Niu, in her article ‘Provenance: Crossing Boundaries’, calls on archivists to broaden their perspectives on what can constitute provenance by surveying the way that this concept has developed across a number of non-archival disciplines. Niu’s intention is not to suggest that archivists manually create more provenance data or laboriously append these to existing descriptions of archival provenance, but rather that they consider new ways to think about provenance and ways in which a range of existing data generated on the Web and through information technology processes could be harvested to augment contextualisation of electronic records.
‘An Educative Intervention: Assisting in the Self-Assessment of Archival Practice in 12 Community Service Organisations’ reports on a number of improvements that have taken place among Australian organisations holding ‘care’ records. Melissa Downing and her co-authors argue that the Who Am I? project’s Self-Assessment Tool for Archives acted as a catalyst for such change and knowledge sharing, bringing together interdisciplinary collaborations that sought to break down the silos between historians, archivists, care providers and care leavers.
Belinda Battley’s article, ‘Finding Aids in Context: Using Records Continuum and Diffusion of Innovations Models to Interpret Descriptive Choices’, analyses survey data regarding the way in which Australian archival innovations – chiefly the Australian Commonwealth Record Series system – have influenced the development of archival finding aids and archival practice in New Zealand. The analysis assesses the Records Continuum model and Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations model as approaches for understanding the dynamics involved in the development of finding aids in New Zealand.
With the Australian archival profession asking long-term questions about the future and recalibrating its current methods, Lara Mancuso introduces us to ‘Archival Appraisal in Brazil’. This is an excellent introduction to the approach taken to appraisal in Brazil’s archival jurisdictions and provides us with food for thought concerning the ways in which appraisal in Australia can potentially be improved.