History
Prior to 1903 there was no formal attempt to deposit Victorian government records with an archival authority. In that year ten volumes of Convict Indents were transferred to the Public Library (later the State Library of Victoria) by the Secretary of the Law Department. In ensuing years, reinforced by a 1927 instruction to departments from the Premier that no documents be destroyed without reference to the trustees of the Public Library, a substantial archival collection of Victorian public records was created. The first archivist was appointed to the staff of the Public Library in 1948. In 1955 a Senior Archivist was appointed and a separate Archives Section was established in 1961. The Library Council of Victoria Act 1965 introduced the first, though brief, legislative provisions for the control and preservation of public records in Victoria.
The Public Records Act came into effect on 17 April 1973. The Laverton Base Repository was acquired in 1975 and developed to ultimately house approximately 80 kilometres of public records and to provide a facility for public research. The holdings, based on the records transferred from the Archives Division of the State Library of Victoria, grew through an active transfer program. A reading room in the Melbourne CBD was established and a regional repository to serve the Victorian Central Highlands Region was established at Ballarat in 1982.
The purpose built Victorian Archives Centre (VAC) was designed and constructed in North Melbourne and all Melbourne based activities of PROV were transferred there, including the complete holdings from the Laverton Base Repository, by 2004. The VAC reading room is named after the first Keeper of Public Records, Harry Nunn OAM, and is a facility shared by PROV with the Melbourne Office of National Archives of Australia. Researchers can thus access archives of both the Victorian and Australian governments in the one reading room. The VAC repository has a potential capacity of over 120 kilometres.
Read more about this topic: Public Record Office Victoria
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)