Transitioning to open access

This issue will be the last issue of Archives & Manuscripts published by Taylor & Francis. After extensive discussions and consultation with its members, the Australian Society of Archivists (ASA) has decided to move towards open access publishing. The next issues will use the same platform as the Archives & Manuscripts 1955–2011 Online Archive at https://publications.archivists.org.au/index.php/asa. Author Guidelines are available from https://publications.archivists.org.au/index.php/asa/guidelines. Using a new open access platform will be the beginning of a new era for A&M, but also a return to a long and proud history of self-publishing, which saw the publication of seminal texts that influenced archival theory and practice in Australia and around the world.

This issue is also the last one for me as General Editor. I greatly appreciated the opportunity to contribute to the work of the ASA and to the promotion of archival scholarship over the past 3 years. However, it is now time for me to step down as General Editor and focus all my attention on my own research, which is studying information access and information preservation practices by marginalised rural communities, under a DECRA Fellowship from the Australian Research Council. I am confident that I am leaving the journal in a strong position with a variety of exciting articles and special issues being prepared.

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This issue includes five peer-reviewed articles and two reflections, which present exciting new research being done in the archival field. In the first article, Rose Barrowcliffe, a Butchulla-Wonamutta woman and PhD student at the University of the Sunshine Coast, examines the social media narratives of Australia’s institutional archives during the 2020 National Reconciliation Week, which coincided with the Black Lives Matter uprising. She highlights the gaps between narratives about Indigenous peoples and narratives told by Indigenous peoples in contemporary archival narratives portrayed in social media; and she argues that ‘to truly achieve equity and social justice for Indigenous peoples, archives must engage with Indigenous counter-narratives in their collecting and exhibiting practices and bring the institutional and Indigenous narratives closer together’.

The Tandanya Declaration, launched by the International Council on Archives Expert Matters Indigenous Group in October 2019, marked a significant milestone in the recognition of the importance of Indigenous priorities in archives. However, its implementation raises many questions. In the second article, Rose Barrowcliffe, Lauren Booker, Sue McKemmish and Kirsten Thorpe reflect on the background and context of the Declaration and discuss pathways for it to be enacted. The article continues the discussion that started with a panel on Supporting and Activating the Adelaide Tandanya Declaration on Indigenous Archives organised by the ASA in September 2020 and explores how actions can be mobilised to support the Declaration in an Indigenous Australian context.

The importance of designing archival systems that acknowledge the special needs of Indigenous people is also reflected in the Indigenous Archives Collective Position Statement on the Right of Reply to Indigenous Knowledges and Information held in Archives. The full text of the Position Statement is reproduced in this issue and, in a reflection piece that accompanies it, members of the Collective reflect on the context of the development of the statement and on the objectives that motivated its development.

In ‘Towards Transformative Practice in Out of Home Care: Chartering Rights in Recordkeeping’, Frank Golding, Sue McKemmish and Barbara Reed discuss the research and advocacy contexts of the CLAN Rights Charter and the Charter of Lifelong Rights in Childhood Recordkeeping in Out of Home Care, and show how their cross-mapping of the two Charters has enabled them to identify gaps in the Charters and to add additional rights. They explore the challenges of translating the Charters into transformative practice, advocating for their adoption and developing guidelines for their implementation.

In the next article, Mark Howard, Steve Wright and Katherine Jarvie discuss the appraisal decisions faced by activists in radical community recordkeeping environments and activist archives. They focus on two radical archives: Archimovi, an Italian archive of radical social movements, and the archive of Direct Action Everywhere, an animal activist group based in the United States.

In the fifth article, Zhiying Lian examines the characteristics of community archives in China and the factors that may facilitate their emergence and their survival in an authoritarian state. She shows that regulations on the establishment of non-governmental museums and social organisations can provide a legal framework for the development of community archives as long as their proponents carefully negotiate the regulatory frameworks and their purposes are not contrary to state policies and strategies. However, as in other countries, the long-term financial survival of community archives can be difficult to ensure because they usually rely on donations.

Finally, in the last article, Rowena Loo presents her reflection on the implementation of a new archival management system at Queensland State Archives (QSA). Her article reflects on QSA’s experience from securing funding for the project to delivering an agency interface and working with a supplier using an agile sprint methodology, and implementing a new archival descriptive model.

The six articles written by Australian authors attest to the richness and the variety of the work being done by Australian archival scholars and practitioners, the complex challenges the archival field is facing, and some of the novel tools and methods Australian academics and practitioners are devising to address these challenges.