In mid-2021, State Records of South Australia was approached by the Attorney General’s Department (AGD) for support on a ‘records reduction project’ for three newly-acquired business units – Planning and Land Use Services (PLUS), the Office of the Registrar-General (ORG) and the Office of the Valuer-General (OVG) - before a planned building move in 2022. These three units have incredibly complex administrative histories, including the longest-running government function in South Australia. Their current records management system was organised by a former department and they held a significant number of legacy records, including some of the earliest government records created in South Australia in the 1830s and 1840s.
AGD inherited the project from PLUS/ORG/OVG’s former parent department – the Department of Planning, Transport and Infrastructure (DPTI) – which was restructured following a Cabinet reshuffle and became the Department of Infrastructure and Transport (DIT) - and seconded an archivist from State Records to sentence and archive hardcopy records prior to the units moving to a new building in late 2022. The project also involved plans to overhaul manual record-keeping prior to migrating to AGD's digital records management system.
The archiving stage was funded for six months, until mid-March 2022. In those six months, which included one month on working from home orders, almost 6000 permanent records across over 100 new series were transferred to State Records' custody.
This project is an example of collaboration between a government archive and government departments to ensure the ongoing preservation of and access to records, but also the role of archives in bringing context and showcasing historical significance.
This paper is my personal musings on the project – what went well, what could have been improved, what I could have done differently – and the challenges of working on such a project during a pandemic and during a time of major administrative change.