International Council of Archives

Greetings from Perth!

I am a Recordkeeping Consultant with the State Records Office of Western Australia (SROWA), the State’s records and archives authority. The SROWA is responsible for assisting Western Australian government organisations with recordkeeping matters, and for maintaining the State archives collection.

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I started work at the SROWA in 1999 as a Recordkeeping Advisory Officer. Part of this role was working in our Search Room where members of the public can access State archives. I enjoyed dealing with the variety of clients – genealogists, historians, school and university students, legal professionals – who would visit or contact the Search Room each day. Through encountering many and varied information searches and the stories behind them, it brought home to me how the archival record can evoke another place and time – how it can make history come alive. This work helped inform and shape the dual role of advising government clients on disposal matters.

Now as a Recordkeeping Consultant my focus is on helping State and local government agencies to work towards better recordkeeping practices. This takes the form of providing advice regarding current recordkeeping issues. In particular, I am part of a team of professionals at the SROWA who work with agencies regarding the development and implementation of their Recordkeeping Plans (RKPs), required under the State Records Act 2000. RKPs are suites of documents that outline the processes of how an organisation keeps its recorded information, as well as plans for future improvement.

The RKP regime has been in place since 2002 and since that time, the SROWA has received a lot of positive feedback about how the requirement for a formal plan for recordkeeping has helped to draw attention to the importance of recordkeeping within agencies. It has also enabled agencies to identify gaps in their records management programmes and progressively work towards improvement.

Our government client base is a diverse one, consisting of more than 300 State and local government organisations across the State. Organisations and branch offices are located within a land area of some 2.5 million square kilometres and some very disparate climates – while many are located in the temperate climate of Perth and the south west of the State, others are located in semiarid conditions or the tropical cyclone prone areas of the north. These varied conditions can affect an agency’s recordkeeping in many ways: government agencies in remote areas may find it difficult to attract staff; services and facilities may be limited; and climatic conditions often have risk implications for the storage and protection of records. Similarly, organizations can vary in terms of resourcing and workforce: the agencies that we deal with may be one-person operations or large departments with thousands of employees – or anything in between.

This means that when we liaise with agencies, our office needs to be mindful of their unique operating environments, and our responses will accommodate those circumstances while emphasising why certain processes are better practice and better for the organisation.

I gain great satisfaction from working with our government clients, knowing that I am contributing to an awareness of why records and recordkeeping are so important. As well as the business benefits that accompany a good recordkeeping regime, having a solid foundation for keeping current records goes a long way towards securing the State’s archives for the future.

Lena Stekl
Recordkeeping Consultant
State Records Office of Western Australia