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.

Archives, Recordkeeping, and Social Justice

“…For some recordkeeping and other professionals, coming face-to-face with Care Leavers and gaining an understanding of their records access experiences has led to a questioning of the power and privilege bound up in traditional archival and recordkeeping frameworks, processes and systems (O'Neill, Selakovic, and Tropea 2012;Humphreys et al 2014;Evans et al 2015;McKemmish, Faulkhead, and Russell 2011). The growing realization of the social injustices built into existing archival access and control frameworks is leading to calls for archival activism and becoming part of the community calling for change (Evans et al 2015).…”

Authenticity in places of belonging: community collective memory as a complex, adaptive recordkeeping system

“…45 Also in Australia, the Find and Connect web resource improves access to existing records for people who were in care, 46 and in Australia, in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, work is being done on transforming recordkeeping for people in care so that their rights to information about themselves are recognised. 47 ''Co-creating places of belonging in the archival implications for archival theory, practice and communities Bastian and Alexander describe the connections between communities and their archives as 'a symbiotic relationship'. 48 This research reveals the need for archival practitioners to consider their own everyday practices, and question whether their work is enabling communities to maintain the connections they need with their records, or whether they are instead creating a barrier.…”