9 Archivists and Public Affairs: Towards a New Archival Public Programming

Nesmith, Tom

doi:10.3138/9781442689879-011

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…1 We live in a society that increasingly relies on information, knowledge and information technologies to function and cope with the demands of our daily lives. 2 In light of all this, Verne Harris questions whether archives are considered by society as important gateways to information. 3 According to the archival literature, 4 the answer to this question is negative.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Taking archives to the people: an examination of public programs in the National Archives of the Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives

Saurombe

2019

Archives and Manuscripts

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Archives serve as society's collective memory in so far as they provide evidence of the past and promote accountability and transparency of past actions. An appreciation of archives would then result in citizens linking archival records with their identity, history, civic duty and cultural heritage. However, research in Eastern and Southern Africa indicates that most citizens are unaware of archives and rarely use them. Apart from financial constraints, this is often associated with inadequate outreach programs. Taking archives to the people (promoting archives) is one way of making citizens aware of archival holdings and facilitating access and use of these resources. Through the application of three research techniques, this article shows that, although the number of archival users in this region is declining, public programming initiatives were not prioritised. Reasons for this included lack of policies; shortage of staff; lack of skills; reluctance to rope in technology in public programming initiatives; working in silos; and budgetary constraints. This article recommends a framework that may help archivists in the Eastern and Southern Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives region to raise awareness about public archival repositories, despite the existing challenges.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Taking archives to the people: an examination of public programs in the National Archives of the Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives

Saurombe

2019

Archives and Manuscripts

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“…Africanisation, in this regard, meant incorporating African heritage, culture, identity, language, theories and ways of knowing in the teaching and learning process (Ngulube et al, 2017). Archival repositories play a vital role in this process by providing access to records related to the debated issues (Nesmith, 2010). Sadly, most South African indigenous communities are undocumented in the public archives (Ngoepe, 2019).…”

Section: Problem Statementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Africanisation of the South African archival curriculum: A preliminary study of undergraduate courses in an open distance e-learning environment

Saurombe¹,

Ngoepe²

2021

EFI

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Educators and archivists in Africa have repeatedly raised the need for redeveloping university curricula to reflect local and global best practice. An African education curriculum case study by the InterPARES project (2013–2018) that covered 38 countries out of 54 revealed the existence of few available archival training programmes in the continent. Literature further reveals that where educational programmes are available, the curriculum is mostly Eurocentric and thereby addresses archival issues from a Western perspective. As a result, the infinite problems facing archivists on the continent such as resources, skills, technology, infrastructure, advocacy, holdings, collaboration, displaced archives and many more (the list is endless) are not fully engaged. The archival programmes at the institution of higher learning appear not to address grand societal challenges such as unaccountability, poor governance, service delivery, as well as the low usage of archives repositories in the continent. In South Africa, there has been a call to use African epistemologies such as Ubuntu, a philosophy that provides an African overview of societal relations or the Batho Pele, principles adopted by the post-apartheid South African government to guide and direct its public service and address imbalances of the apartheid regime. This study utilised the Africanisation pillar of Sibanda (2016)’s model to analyse the infusion of curriculum transformation into the ten modules for archives and records management in an open distance e-learning (ODeL) environment. In this regard, the content of ten archives and records management modules for a bachelor’s degree in an ODeL environment is analysed to explore the transformation of archival curriculum. Only one university in South Africa offers a fully-fledged bachelor’s degree with a major in archives and records management. The study established that an attempt was made to transform the archival curriculum at study material development and module delivery level. This resulted in a missed opportunity to transform archival curriculum in the development of the new bachelor’s degree being implemented in 2017. The study concludes by arguing that failure to decolonise the archival curriculum will result in archivists being highly unlikely to contribute to solutions to societal problems that are difficult to solve confronting South Africa using local solutions. It is recommended that transformation of the curriculum should start at a programme level rather than module level.

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“…Archives are kept for use (McCausland, 2017), and therefore, it is essential to determine why people are missing from the archives (Nesmith, 2010). This ties in with Batho Pele principles in that the principles compel public entities such as archives to serve the public effectually.…”

Section: Challenges Faced By Archival Institutions In Raising Awarene...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This leaves the NARSSA with no option but to come up with measures to raise awareness about the archives to encourage the use of these important records. However, researchers such as Ngulube et al (2017), Mukwevho and Ngoepe (2019), and Netshakhuma (2019) are of the view that the NARSSA still needs to strengthen its efforts towards reaching out to the South African communities, particularly the marginalised communities. Ngoepe (2017) and Saurombe (2018) further discuss the problem of undocumented communities within the archives, and minimal efforts have been made by the NARSSA directed towards changing this status quo.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Applying Batho Pele principles in South African public archives – Do public programming initiatives count?

Mojapelo

Modiba

Saurombe

2021

Information Development

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Archival records exist for the benefit of society; therefore, people are at the very centre of the purpose of keeping archives. The South African government developed the Batho Pele principles to embrace them as a charter for public service to ensure a reliable and customer-oriented public service. Archival institutions such as the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa and the provincial archives are not exempted from this responsibility. These repositories form a part of the South African Public Service and play a crucial role in promoting the preservation and access to significant records that have enduring value. The National Archives and Records Service of South Africa and the provincial archives are responsible for preserving public and non-public records and promoting them to the public. In this quantitative study, an online survey completed by 20 archivists from these repositories helped establish whether archivists from the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa and the provincial archives utilised public programming initiatives to fulfil the Batho Pele principles. The analysed data indicated that the public archival institutions struggle to conduct public programming initiatives, and their limited efforts were not effective. This implies that most of these repositories did not consider public programming initiatives as tools to implement the Batho Pele principles. The study recommends that South African public archival institutions take advantage of the ‘window of opportunity’ presented by the Batho Pele principles to strengthen their outreach strategies to improve archival service quality.

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9 Archivists and Public Affairs: Towards a New Archival Public Programming

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Taking archives to the people: an examination of public programs in the National Archives of the Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives

Taking archives to the people: an examination of public programs in the National Archives of the Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives

Africanisation of the South African archival curriculum: A preliminary study of undergraduate courses in an open distance e-learning environment

Applying Batho Pele principles in South African public archives – Do public programming initiatives count?

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