PROV a winner in the Leadership Awards

2011 has been a bumper year for Public Record Office Victoria. Last Wednesday all the hard work was paid off during the annual Arts Portfolio Leadership Awards. The Awards, held at the National Gallery of Victoria, recognise excellence across the Victorian Government arts agencies and cover a wide range of categories from excellence in public programs through to business improvement, to leadership in disability access. Public Record Office Victoria earned top prize in the category of Leadership in Business Improvement for the Recordkeeping Standards Project – an outstanding achievement recognising the significance of this incredibly important program.

The Recordkeeping Standards Project was established to create new and accessible standards for recordkeeping within the Victorian Government in order to make the management of our State’s records more compliant, achievable and user-friendly. The Project has delivered a suite of practical standards and guidelines developed to assist agencies within the public sector in implementing a sound program of records management that addresses the needs of relevant stakeholders. The award was announced by Penny Hutchinson, Director, Arts Victoria who said that recordkeeping touches on every single agency and is so fundamentally important to the work that we do. This award recognises the fact that PROV now has a complete suite of recordkeeping standards and supporting documents for the first time in our 38-year history.

Public Record Office also received a Highly Commended award in the category of Leadership in Community for the popular Footprints travelling exhibition. Footprints delves into the collections of both the Public Record Office Victoria and National Archives of Australia which have a large amount of material relating directly to Victorian Aboriginal People. Both organisations have produced a number of resources, publications and training seminars explaining how to access these records. What was missing was an inspiring story that could reach out and touch an audience in a personal and meaningful way. Footprints: The journey of Lucy and Percy Pepper is an extraordinary touring exhibition that uses both government and family records to trace the lives of one Aboriginal family in the first half of the twentieth century.

And finally, the hard work of PROV’s fabulous volunteers were acknowledged, recognising over 15,000 hours of incredible work cataloguing the collection, auditing record data, conducting tours and so much more. A big congratulations to all staff at Public Record Office Victoria and to our colleagues within fellow arts agencies. For further information on the Arts Portfolio Leadership Awards visit Arts Victoria.