Unfettered Resilience of School Archivists in Maintaining Value of Records to Support the New Zealand School Curriculum

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore the key function of school archives and to highlight the important roles school archivists play in maintaining the value of records to support the curriculum. Although school archives play an important role in the school, little has been researched in New Zealand about the challenges school archivists face and their unfettered resilience to push through those obstacles to maintain the value of school records to support the curriculum. This article is part of a study in progress that employs an interpretive qualitative approach to understand the perspectives of school archivists on their purpose. The perspectives of seven school archivists from four regions of New Zealand are presented. The findings reveal the core functions of the school archive as a source of information for researchers, family members of past students, and corporate entities. The archive supports teaching and learning by providing teachers with useful and unique teaching aids from the collection. It also serves to preserve the identity and memory of the school. Specific tasks of the school archivist include collecting items for the archive, organising the collection, reporting, and displaying the materials for easy access and use by those who need them. Certain resources enable the archivist to achieve their purposes, but their passion is a key enabler. The main challenges school archivists face relate to issues with training and skills development, resourcing, recognition and awareness, inadequate facilities and collaboration. The study has useful implications for archival research in New Zealand as it discusses an area that has not been explored before. This article is limited to the perspectives of only seven school archivists, meaning it can be difficult to form a generalisation of school archivists in the whole of New Zealand. However, the study is still in progress and the author hopes to gather more perspectives in order to make a comprehensive generalisation.