Hie need for local archives

Press, 11 April 1978, Page 16

Hie need for local archives

Few New Zealanders will ever use archives, either national or local. But their perceptions of themselves as New Zealanders will be altered if those who do research on and write about various aspects of the country’s history find that indifference or negligence has denied them important sources of knowledge about the past. The sorry fact is that while our national archives are reasonably well organised and tended, local records are too often inadequately cared for and lost or damaged as a result.

Careful preservation of comprehensive, properly selected, records of local organisations and institutions is necessary not merely to justify antiquarian curiosity about local history but also to provide the raw material for those studies which explore where we have been and where we may be going as a nation. Fortunately, awareness is growing of the need to preserve the records of local government, business firms, union branches and a host of voluntary societies and organisations. One of last year’s amendments to the Local Government Act included several clauses on the preservation of local archives. These clauses gave the Chief Archivist the power to specify classes of local archives that local authorities could not destroy without his approval, required local authorities to protect and provide for the use of such archives and, perhaps most importantly, empowered local authorities to establish district or regional repositories and to buy or accept various sorts of documents to be held in these repositories.

Unfortunately, no mention was made of professional staff to help establish and manage these repositories — and deciding which documents

should be kept and how they should be classified and preserved is assuredly no job for an amateur. The Government would do well to heed the plea of the Archives and Records Association and appoint to the National Archives extra staff whose sole responsibility would be to help local bodies decide what documents to save and how to classify and store them. Without such appointments the clauses of the Local Government Amendment (No. 3) Act relating to local archives will be a pious expression of what would be desirable and little more.

The cost of, say, two local authority archivists would not be great, but their impact could well be significant. Those local authority officers who are already keen to do their best to preserve important records but unsure how to go about it could be usefully guided and inspired. Such guidance and inspiration could in the long run save money by ensuring that local authority officers do not waste time and effort going about preserving records the wrong way. With the assurance of professional help too, local bodies themselves will be more inclined to find the money to provide suitable premises for local repositories both to house their own records and to provide a safe resting place for the much more vulnerable but important records of other bqdies like business firms, unions and voluntary organisations.

In these ways, the modest cost of employing just a few archivists to advise and assist local bodies could make an enormous difference to the ability of future historians to write the full and accurate accounts of life in New Zealand today and in the more distant past without which future New Zealanders will be likely to find themselves sadly adrift.