ABSTRACT This is a reflective essay on some of the cultural, literary criticism, historical , and postmodern implications for records management and archiving, archives, and archivists from a point of view situated in the United Kingdom. It is based on observing the changes, over the past ten years, in the position of archives in various countries' perceptions. The author maintains that archivists have the critical role of producing an archiving resolution of the tensions in society at any one time between what should be kept and destroyed, and what should be open and closed-both for the present and, more importantly, for future generations. Archivists need to make the manner of the archival resolution clear and understand the inherent biases in the processes necessary to achieve that resolution. The subject of archives is, on the face of it, dry and dusty, but nevertheless fascinating for all sorts of reasons to many millions of people across the world. Moreover, in its formal, organizational, and utilitarian guise as "Arch-ives," it is increasingly emerging from the "basement to the boardroom" in governments and organizations and becoming a cultural phenomenon at the same *

In an interview published in a recent anthology of essays concerned with the ‘archive’, Beatrice von Bismarck and Irmgard Christa Becker proffered two connected yet competing views. While both agreed that ‘there are institutional similarities between archives and museums with regard to their basic idea, their administration and their reception’1 for Becker, a trained archivist, the public archive is bound by rules that do not obtain for museums.

ABSTRACT Audiovisual archiving began in Australia in 1935 under the auspices of the country’s National Library. From earliest times its Film Division had an ambivalent relationship with the parent body. In 1952 a campaign to make it an autonomous body was quashed, but the sense of “separateness” was permanently crystallised. After first contact in 1957, and encouraged by Jerzy Toeplitz and Ernest Lindgren, the Film Division joined FIAF in 1959. Yet its lack of involvement in FIAF affairs, and complaints from other Australian sources, led an exasperated Lindgren in 1969 to warn National Library head Harold White that its membership was at risk. In 1972 White’s successor, Allan Fleming, repaired the relationship and allocated enlarged resources for film archive work. Relocating to Australia in 1972 to become founding director of the new Australian Film and Television School, Toeplitz took a close interest in the National Library’s film activities, consulting with its Council and urgin...