Digitizing Archival Records: Benefits and Challenges for a Large Professional Accounting Association

With antecedents extending to 1886, CPA Australia is one of the world’s most significant professional accounting associations. Reflective of its long history and widespread influence, the organization holds an extensive and diverse archive that evidences both its own development and the general evolution of accounting and business practices. This article presents a case study of a project to digitize selected aspects of this archive. Informed by perspectives on managing archives in the digital era, the benefits and challenges of digitization are presented. A key benefit was enabling access to digital images while preserving rare and fragile original records and documents. However, challenges arose in prioritizing the items for digitization, and this necessitated the development of a model, taking the form of a decision matrix. The CPA Australia case study will be informative for other organizations seeking to use digitization as a means to overcome the dilemma associated with providing access to archival materials while also ensuring their preservation. RESUME CPA Australia , dont les origines remontent a 1886, demeure une des societes professionnelles de comptables les plus importantes au monde. A l’image de sa longue histoire et de son influence tres etendue, l’organisation detient des archives considerables et diverses qui font preuve a la fois de son developpement et de l’evolution generale de la comptabilite et des pratiques d’affaires. Cet article presente une etude de cas d’un projet pour numeriser certains aspects de ces archives. Fonde sur des perspectives sur la gestion des archives a l’ere numerique, on y presente les avantages et les defis de la numerisation. Un avantage cle est de permettre l’acces aux images numeriques tout en preservant des documents d’archives originaux rares et fragiles. Cependant, des defis ont surgi lorsqu’il fut question de determiner quels documents numeriser en priorite, d’ou la necessite de developper un modele qui a pris la forme d’une matrice decisionnelle. L’etude de cas de la CPA Australia interessera d’autres organisations qui cherchent a se servir de la numerisation comme moyen de surmonter le dilemme lie a la question de donner acces au materiel archivistique tout en assurant sa preservation.