Services For Depositors

A major role of the Noel Butlin Archives Centre (Archives of Business and Labour) is to assist with the preservation of the records of significant companies, trade unions and other organisations that have influenced the creation of Australia as it is today. These records of Australian industry and the labour movement provide the raw material for a wide range of research interests.

The Archives provides advice on the management of current records as well archives:

• Why keep records?
• What kind of research?
• What does the depositor gain?
• How does the Archives operate?
• Deposit and access conditions

Organisations interested in depositing records with the Archives should contact the Archives for further information. Advice can also be given on the most appropriate location for your records whether at the Australian National University or elsewhere. The Archives’ collecting policy governs the acceptance of collections.

A procedural guide has been developed by the Archives to assist depositing organisations identify records of permanent value, list and despatch these records, monitor the growth of their archival collection in the Archives and use the Archives effectively for their own reference requirements.

Why keep records?

This is probably the first question many will ask. There are two principal reasons for the maintenance of any archival institution. Archives are the memory of the institution that produces them. They are also the raw material from which all historical writing is produced. The Noel Butlin Archives Centre (Archives of Business and Labour) was founded specifically to collect and make available records for research and that is still its primary objective. Nevertheless, the corporate memory function and assistance with current records management have been and continue to be an important part of our work.

What kind of research?

Corporate records, whether company or trade union, might be thought of primarily as sources for institutional histories. This kind of publication is certainly produced from the records. But there are two other kinds of use to which company and trade union records can be put.

The first is the broadly based study of a major area of enquiry, exemplified by Professor N G Butlin's Investment in Australian Economic Development 1861-1900. One expects to find information about the history of institutions in their records - they were created in the course of that history and formed part of it. So too, one would expect that the records of an organisation significant in a broad economic or social development would contain information about that development.

The second kind of use relies on the fact that the records contain information which was quite incidental to the purposes of the company managers and union executives who created them. The Superintendents of the Australian Agricultural Company may have been surprised to discover how much information about the social and political history of New South Wales was included in the records they kept in the course of their administration of the company's business. This includes information on wage rates for miners, urban planning, nineteenth century mining technology, the introduction of fencing, animal husbandry practices and the economies of horse-powered transport.

A summary of publications written using records held at the Archives is available on the Bibliography page of this web site.

What does the depositor gain?

Records are the memory of the organisation that produced them. Like any memory, not much is to be gained from the records unless they are maintained in an ordered fashion so that information that is required can be retrieved at will. Once records have ceased to be in daily use, many organisations feel that they cannot afford to keep them in prime record storage space and they are often stored in inadequate conditions where, because of the difficulty of finding the right record, the information content is effectively lost.

By contrast, records transferred to the safe-keeping of the Archives are sorted, arranged in their proper series, listed in detail, boxed and stored on steel shelving in a modern concrete building safe from fire, water, mildew, insects and vermin. They are cared for by trained archivists, part of whose job it is to respond to requests from depositors for information from their records.

Thus, the benefits are threefold:

• storage space is freed for more profitable use;
• information requests are answered more quickly with little expenditure of executive time;
• records are spared the deterioration caused by unsatisfactory storage conditions and the damage and disruption caused by searching in those conditions.

Furthermore, the final products of the research work undertaken on the records are of benefit to both the organisation and the industry in which it operates.

How does the Archives operate?

Once agreement is reached on deposit, the first step is a survey of the records, the object being to define and locate permanently valuable records. This is followed by the packing, listing and despatch of the records to the Archives. A procedure guide is available to assist with this step.

Once the records reach the Archives, they are registered and placed in the initial storage area to wait their turn for processing. At this stage, the packing list forms the finding aid that ensures that information requests from the depositor can be answered immediately. When archival staff are free to deal with the deposit, the records are unpacked, checked off against the packing list, and examined in some detail.

Some research is done to establish the administrative history of the creating organisation and a brief history note is written. The various series are identified and a detailed shelf list is created. The completed collection is then labelled and shelved as a unit with its own unique number. Finally, a copy of the detailed list is sent to the depositor.

Deposit and access conditions

Records deposited with the Archives are governed by an agreement between the owner of the records and the Archives. This agreement is summarised in a statement entitled Conditions of Deposit. This statement is available from the Senior Archivist, NBAC and is available in four versions:

• business records;
• records of employer and industry bodies, professional and other associations;
• trade unions records; and
• personal papers.

In return for allowing the records to be accessed for research purposes, the Archives agrees to provide:

• secure and cost-efficient storage;
• transportation and re-boxing of records;
• description of records;
• professional appraisal and disposal advice;
• rapid reference and retrieval services; and
• supervision of the use of the records.

Further advice is available by contacting the Archives.