CHICAGO — Records and archival arrangements in Australia are globally relevant because Australia’s indigenous people represent the oldest living culture in the world, and because modern Australia is an ex-colonial society now heavily multicultural in outlook.
Michael Piggott’s “Archives and Societal Provenance: Australian Essays,” published by Chandos Publishing and available through ALA Neal-Schuman, explores this distinctiveness, using the theoretical concept of societal provenance as propounded by Canadian archival scholars. His essays blend new writing and re-workings of earlier work, comprising the first text to apply a societal provenance perspective to a national setting.
Piggott is a consultant and independent scholar. He is a former Australian archivist with 37 years of experience as an archival practitioner and manager. His career included appointments at the National Library of Australia, the Australian War Memorial, the National Archives of Australia and the University of Melbourne. He has been active in the Australian Society of Archivists since its inception in 1975 and has produced scholarly guides to collections, and published widely on archival history and education, including personal papers and diaries. His latest refereed work was an invited paper for the inaugural issue of Grainger Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. In 2010 he was invited to become an honorary associate of the National Museum of Australia’s Centre for Historical Research, and an honorary member of the Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics, Monash University.
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