Conference Keynote
| Wednesday, November 12, 2025 |
| 9:00 AM - 10:30 AM |
| The Grand Lodge |
Overview
Accountability, rights and care: Reflections on 30 years in the Australian archival and recordkeeping profession
Speaker
Dr Joanne Evans
Associate Professor
Department of Human Centred Computing, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University
Accountability, rights and care: Reflections on 30 years in the Australian archival and recordkeeping profession
Abstract
Stories have arcs. Narrative arcs that move the plot along from beginning to end, intersecting with character arcs, the ways in which the plot line impacts, shapes and changes the people involved. I've been fortunate to have had a 30 year career in the Australian archival and recordkeeping profession moulded by moments big and small, and driven by a passion for the role of records and recordkeeping in people's lives. It has also been intimately and intricately intertwined with the imperatives and opportunities of digital and networking information technologies, and enriched by records continuum theory and thinking.
Reflecting on my time in the Australian archival and recordkeeping profession, my story can be seen to have an arc of Accountability, Rights and Care, three discernible shifts in the archival discourse that have influenced me, and that as a scholar I've had a small role in influencing. Using these themes, I'll explore some Australian contributions to our understanding of records and recordkeeping and consider what that means for authenticity, integrity and reliability in the age of AI.
Reflecting on my time in the Australian archival and recordkeeping profession, my story can be seen to have an arc of Accountability, Rights and Care, three discernible shifts in the archival discourse that have influenced me, and that as a scholar I've had a small role in influencing. Using these themes, I'll explore some Australian contributions to our understanding of records and recordkeeping and consider what that means for authenticity, integrity and reliability in the age of AI.
Biography
Associate Professors Joanne Evans is an archival and recordkeeping researcher and educator in the Faculty of Information Technology (FIT), Monash University, and is currently the lead of the Digital Transformation group in the Department of Human Centred Computing. Prior to undertaking her PhD at Monash in 2003, she led archival systems development at the eScholarship Research Centre (and its predecessors) at the University of Melbourne, and spent many happy hours programming metadata databases based on Scott's Series System. In 2010 she moved to Monash as a T&R academic, teaching into the archives and recordkeeping and library and information science specialisations of FIT's postgraduate degrees. In 2015 she was awarded FIT's first Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, Connecting the Disconnected: Co-designing Integrated and Inclusive Recordkeeping and Archival Networks. Through this fellowship she established the interdisciplinary Recordkeeping and the Rights of the Child Research Program to address the lifelong identity, memory and accountability needs of childhood out of home care. This involves the exploration of participatory design and research strategies to develop dynamic evidence and memory management frameworks, processes and systems supportive of multiple rights in records and recordkeeping.
