International Council of Archives

"Kia ora koutou. Cyfarchion i chi gyd."
Greetings to you all from Wellington, New Zealand.

My name is Hywel Williams and I’m an Information Management Analyst at Statistics New Zealand. I'm originally from Cardiff, the capital city of Wales, but now find myself living the other side of the world.

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My interest in archives goes back over a decade to when I was first introduced to medieval archives and manuscripts at university and studied the traditional disciplines of palaeography and diplomatics. However, my work over the last year and more has been to build digital systems and processes for managing digital archives.

So how did I get from Wales to New Zealand and from mediaeval manuscripts to born digital records and data? I studied Archives Administration at the University of Aberystwyth while on a scholarship at the National Library of Wales for 3 years. While there I catalogued the papers of 20th century authors, playwrights, architects, political figures and a collection of about 500 medieval and renaissance manuscripts. Having had my interest piqued while studying at Aberystwyth, I decided to move to New Zealand to find out what this 'series system' and 'continuum' stuff was all about. I got a job as an Archivist at Archives New Zealand and, three years on I'm a complete convert!

For those three years I worked in Arrangement & Description and then Description and Discovery as an Archivist overseeing transfers of records from government agencies to Archives New Zealand and making them discoverable for our users. I also reviewed transfer processes, legal instruments for agreeing access conditions to records and contributed to a variety of projects around improving searching tools and descriptive practices.

Archives New Zealand is in the middle of an exciting programme to build a Government Digital Archive for New Zealand. I was a Subject Matter Expert in the programme representing various teams in the gathering and documentation of requirements and working with business analysts and developers in the implementation and building of the digital archive. I also lead the planning of the migration of descriptive metadata between the old and new databases sitting behind Archway, Archives New Zealand’s archival management system. All very detailed but greatly rewarding work.

I recently moved to work at Statistics New Zealand as an Information Management Analyst in the Data Management and Preservation team, a role that promises to be both exciting and challenging. Statistics New Zealand is at the beginning of a massive programme of change and improving the management of data, descriptive metadata and the data archive is an important part of that. Part of my role here will be to develop a roadmap for providing data archiving services to the Official Statistics System (OSS) across government and support government agencies to manage their data well and ensure their data is reusable in the future.

So plenty of challenges ahead in the next year and that’s before preparing a presentation for the ICA Congress! It all makes for a very exciting future. I look forward to seeing you all in Brisbane and would love it if you came up and said hello, although a word of warning – I may get very excited at you.

Hywel Williams