RAS-1974 — Page 25

THE PAPER CHASE

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administrative reasons, to be kept for specified periods of time or until the completion of certain actions.

In many departments of government records of this kind may represent as much as 50% of their total holdings at any one time, and where their volume is great, as it often is, the problem arises of how to keep them readily available at the same time as minimis- ing the cost of their storage.

Computerisation, microphotography and other techniques have been used increasingly over the last twenty or thirty years to help meet this problem, and with considerable success; but over quite a wide range of record classes the application of these bulk reduction and information storage and retrieval processes has been found to be uneconomical or impracticable due to the form or physical con- dition of the records themselves or because of the relatively short periods during which some intermediate records need to be retain-

ed.

For the time being, then, there is no escape from the need to store and control large bodies of records by conventional means.

One of the expedients employed increasingly in developed countries over the last few decades, as I have said, is that of centra- lised storage. Records reaching the "intermediate" stage of their existence are relinquished by their creating departments to a central repository which operates as a division of the government's Archive office. These central repositories, or "intermediate record centres" as they are termed, are usually located in low-cost areas and operate in some measure as extensions of the departments' own registries. The transferred records are maintained in very much the same manner as they are in the departments and are regularly culled and finally disposed of in accordance with schedules deve- loped and administered by the archival authority in consultation with the departments concerned. Official reference to the records. in the meantime is facilitated by a courier service,

The main advantages of the system are that it minimises storage costs, rids offices of seldom-used records and facilitates the regular and systematic destruction of valueless papers; and since records are kept in a more orderly condition in intermediate record centres than they generally are in departments it leads to more rapid retrie- val of information. An efficient record centre should be able to produce any paper demanded of it within ten minutes.