Peter J. Scott and the Australian ‘series’ system: its origins, features, rationale, impact and continuing relevance

During the 1960s Peter J. Scott and colleagues at the then Commonwealth Archives Office (now National Archives of Australia) devised a new approach to archival intellectual control which separated descriptive information about the creators of records from information about the records themselves. This approach - which became known as the ‘series’ system - has since been adopted by all public records institutions in Australia and New Zealand and by a number of other archival programmes around the world. It has also fundamentally influenced the development and evolution of international archival descriptive standards. In this article, Adrian Cunningham, Laura Millar, and Barbara Reed explore the origins, features, rationale, impact, and continuing relevance of Scott's series system.