Australian Series System
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The Australian Series System is an
archival An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials – in any medium – or the physical facility in which they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or ...
control or
metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...
system, used primarily to describe records in the custody of archival institutions. It was developed at the Australian Archives and forms the basis for the Australian Society of Archivists' committee on descriptive standards guide ″Describing archives in context″. In 1966, Peter Scott of the Commonwealth Archives Office (predecessor to the
National Archives of Australia The National Archives of Australia (NAA), formerly known as the Commonwealth Archives Office and Australian Archives, is an Australian Government agency that serves as the national archives of the nation. It collects, preserves and encourages ...
) developed the system (in practice, referred to as the Commonwealth Records Series System by the National Archives) in his paper "The Record Group Concept: A Case for Abandonment". This approach represented a change in traditional archival theories of
provenance Provenance (from the French ''provenir'', 'to come from/forth') is the chronology of the ownership, custody or location of a historical object. The term was originally mostly used in relation to works of art but is now used in similar senses i ...
that groups records by the more flexible record series rather than the record group which required all records to be filed under only one creating agency (business, government agency, individual, etc.). The new system recognises that creating agencies change names, split and dissolve over time and provides a flexible framework to arrange their records across the different agencies which all share the same organizational content. These record series are relational in that they are linked to their historical creating agencies in their various forms to reflect changes in organizational structure over time. The system is noted for its separation of data about record-keeping and context, by structuring an archive's organisation through individually describing separate "Context entities" for: * Records (the bunch of documents); * Agents (the persons or organisations that create and manage the Records); and/or, * Functional Provenance (the business the Agents do). In this the traditional ''
Respect des fonds ''Respect des fonds'', or ''le respect pour les fonds'', is a principle in archival theory that proposes to group collections of archival records according to their fonds (according to the entity by which they were created or from which they were ...
'' and
original order Original order is a concept in archival theory that a group of records should be maintained in the same order as they were placed by the record's creator. Along with provenance, original order is a core tenet of the archival concept of ''respect d ...
are both incorporated and extended, particularly useful where an original function is maintained by differing agents through time.


References

Archival science National Archives of Australia {{database-stub