26
A. I. DIAMOND
number of large, and from a research point of view, extremely valuable accumulations of records, both official and private, relating to this area are preserved in various oversea institutions and in many cases these are available in Xerox, microfilm or other copy form.
It is desirable that the P.R.O. should acquire as wide a coverage of these sources as possible and the Hong Kong Government has agreed to support a programme of expenditure extending over several years for this purpose. A commitment of $65,000 to begin the programme has been approved in the current Estimates.
What is to be said of the government's post-war archive resources?
Most departments have developed, or are developing routines for the destruction of their unwanted records. As a matter of fact, planned records disposal has a surprisingly long history in Hong Kong. Measures to limit the accumulation of ephemeral papers were adopted by Colonial Secretariat and certain of the departments well before the war and, in spite of the wholesale destruction of public records during the occupation, similar methods were being re-introduced by some offices as early as 1948.
The increasing pressure on office accommodation since the war has led, in many departments, to acute storage problems and to efforts to solve these by records disposal programmes of increasing scope and intensity. The methods used have varied according to the nature of the records concerned and to the urgency of the storage problem. In some offices destruction has been sporadic and haphazard; in others it is carried out on a regular basis in accordance with carefully detailed instructions.
In the interests of efficiency it is desirable that departments should develop procedures for the elimination of valueless documents. The trouble is that in many cases these have been devised with such narrow attention to purely administrative or legal considerations, and prosecuted so rigorously, that much material of importance for historical and other research has been destroyed with the rubbish.
This should not be taken to imply that Hong Kong's officialdom has been remiss. Administrators, as we have noted, are not employed, and most of them are not equipped, to conserve records of academic interest; and even were they to attempt it their efforts in
26
A. I. DIAMOND
number of large, and from a research point of view, extremely valuable accumulations of records, both official and private, relating to this area are preserved in various oversea institutions and in many cases these are available in Xerox, microfilm or other copy form.
It is desirable that the P.R.O. should acquire as wide a coverage of these sources as possible and the Hong Kong Government has agreed to support a programme of expenditure extending over several years for this purpose. A commitment of $65,000 to begin the programme has been approved in the current Estimates.
What is to be said of the government's post-war archive resour- ces?
Most departments have developed, or are developing routines for the destruction of their unwanted records. As a matter of fact. planned records disposal has a surprisingly long history in Hong Kong. Measures to limit the accumulation of ephemeral papers were adopted by Colonial Secretariat and certain of the departments well before the war and, in spite of the wholesale destruction of public records during the occupation, similar methods were being re-introduced by some offices as early as 1948.
The increasing pressure on office accommodation since the war has led, in many departments, to acute storage problems and to efforts to solve these by records disposal programmes of increasing scope and intensity. The methods used have varied according to the nature of the records concerned and to the urgency of the stor- age problem. In some offices destruction has been sporadic and haphazard; in others it is carried out on a regular basis in accor- dance with carefully detailed instructions,
In the interests of efficiency it is desirable that departments should develop procedures for the elimination of valueless documents. The trouble is that in many cases these have been devised with such narrow attention to purely administrative or legal considerations, and prosecuted so rigorously, that much material of importance for historical and other research has been destroyed with the rubbish.
This should not be taken to imply that Hong Kong's officialdom has been remiss. Administrators, as we have noted, are not em- ployed, and most of them are not equipped, to conserve records of academic interest; and even were they to attempt it their efforts in
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.