The Director-General of the National Archives of Australia, Ross Gibbs, today announced that a prominent business archivist, Bruce Smith, has been selected as the winner of the inaugural Ian Maclean Award.
Making the announcement at a function at the Sydney Records Centre in The Rocks, Mr Gibbs said that Mr Smith is an active professional member and past treasurer of the Australian Society of Archives and has lectured in Archives and Records Management at the RMIT in Melbourne since 1995. He is a member of the International Council on Archives (ICA) and has also been on the ICA’s steering committee of Business and Labour Archives since 2000.
‘The National Archives conceived the Ian Maclean award to provide an individual with a paid opportunity to conduct research to benefit the archival profession in Australia, and Bruce Smith is a first-class choice,’ Mr Gibbs said.
‘He has been a major driver of the website Guide to Australian Business Records and the $15,000 stipend will allow him to further enhance our knowledge of business archives,’ he said.
Mr Smith said that he hoped his work would improve the base upon which acquisition decisions can be made in business archives and help identify which types of records should be targeted for collection.
‘Business is under-documented in an historical sense and under represented in archives, both in terms of holdings and professional practice…apart from a handful of initiatives, little has happened to promote the identification, collection and use of business archives,’ Mr Smith said.
‘Thanks to this award and the ongoing support of the large business archives held by the ANU and the University of Melbourne, I hope to redress that situation,’ he said.
The National Archives award is named in memory of Ian Maclean (1919-2003) who worked passionately for the Archives profession for 50 years, starting as the first Commonwealth Archives Officer in October 1944.
He was also Principal Archivist for the South East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) in Bangkok from 1969 until 1974 and later served as a consultant for UNESCO in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. On his retirement in 1980 he was Principal Archivist at the Archives Authority of NSW. In 1996 he received an Order of Australia for his contribution to the archival profession.