Chairperson’s statement 6 ceo’s report 9

Analysis

AIATSIS met all but one of the 2016–17 targets to ensure the collection is safe, accessible, valued and growing were exceeded. Securing the collection was AIATSIS’ primary focus this year, and the attention, resources and effort applied to use this funding effectively shows in these excellent results.

Across the collections, a great deal of effort has gone into implementation of the DAMS, a transformation which will support the effective operation of the collection many years into the future. While there has been a team dedicated to the rollout from a business analysis and technical perspective, employees across all areas of the collection have needed to divert time towards the transition to new systems and workflows and the integration of legacy systems.

Tackling the backlog in registration and accession — integral to implementation of the next phase of the DAMS — will change the size and distribution of the collection over time. This will reflect increased knowledge and understanding of the material already offered and/or accepted, not necessarily the content of the collection itself.

The revised collection development strategy, currently in draft, is designed to increase acquisition of material created by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, communities and organisations. Variation can be observed within media — for example, a reduction in moving image film deposits, which is expected given technological changes, while video and born-digital deposits are increasing.

The one target not achieved is in material accepted into the collection. This is due to reconsideration of priorities across the work program. The decision was taken to deal with existing backlogs before adding significantly more material to the collection, and to increase quality checks and ingest to ensure digital items added to the collection can be found and used.

Preservation digitisation has been a very high priority to secure the existing collection, and progress far above the target has been achieved. Within this outcome, a relatively lower rate of audio preservation can be observed. After a campaign to digitise high-risk audio material over several years, work is now focused on remaining fragile field tapes rather than archive tapes. Field tapes are often in poorer condition and require one or more conservation treatments to prepare them for digitisation. They also need close attention throughout the digitisation processes.

With so much work during the year to preserve and manage the collection, it is rewarding to see that access and use of the collection is increasing, evident in visits, inquiries and catalogue use, and that high levels of client satisfaction have been maintained. While the type and value of materials supplied to communities under the Return of Materials to Indigenous Communities resulted in a lower dollar value than the previous year, a greater number of communities received collection items.