Kurniatun, A.Md., S.I.P conveyed her big thanks after being announced as the best archivist in the UGM Human Achievement Night in the framework of UGM 71st Anniversary on Wednesday night (4/11). She felt very grateful for her hard work and dedication as an archivist for receiving appreciation from Universitas Gadjah Mada.
Besides, Kurniatun is known as a person who likes to very much enjoy doing her work. She remains to maintain the work unit’s archives at UGM faithfully.
She is a type of diligent person, painstakingly, and full of patience. She always remains and convinces the leaders of each work unit at UGM about the importance of archives. As a result, the work unit’s archive management seems even more organized and better.
“We can see that the work unit’s archives are getting better, from previously irregular to becoming regular, and a Records Center was settled in the work unit,” said Kurniatun, at the UGM campus on Friday (6/11).
In fact, concerning the process of assisting the work unit’s archives, she has written in an article published by “Diplomacy: Journal of Applied Archives”, UGM Vocational School with the title “Development of Work Unit Archives as Efforts to Save the Work Unit Archives” (link to the journal article https: //doi.org/10.22146/diplomatika.39562).
She did not hesitate to provide input for improvement and development at the UGM Archives Office as her workplace. For example, these various inputs give input for developing an archive service application. Accordingly, all the archives that the user is looking for can be found quickly and easily.
“All recorded files that a user is looking for can be found easily. This convenience makes users easier to determine which files they will access. During the current Covid-19 pandemic, I recommend that UGM should make a policy that requires all work units within UGM to submit archives to the UGM Archives so that it will be saved,” she said.
Besides carrying out routine work as an archivist, processing archives, storing archives, maintaining archives, archiving services, processing archival information, and shrinking archives and working unit archive assistance, she still has time to do another job as Khazanah Editor. In addition, she also writes for the Archives Development Journal, mentoring students apprenticeship / PKL at the UGM Archives, assessing the DUPNK archive of UGM archivists, publishing source manuscripts, and others.
She deserves to win second place in the 2016 National Archives Writing Competition in the Archival Human Resources Category organized by the National Archives of the Republic of Indonesia. The title of the manuscript raised at that time was “Preserved Archives, Collective Memories of a Saved Nation”.
“It feels like I have my satisfaction when I can save archives through archive processing, mentoring, and acquisition of archives from work units within UGM. It can also provide the archive quickly for the user, especially to make plans or materials for making decisions,” she explained.
She feels sorry if still there are people who think that the archive task is not that important or assuming that archiving is only a side job.
“This is what sometimes causes problems in the future. They never think what if when needed archives are difficult to find, or lost and so on,” Kurniatun added.
Becoming the best UGM archivist, she thought that this is the result of her hard work for so long. She confirmed that since studying at D3 UGM Archives, she had “fallen in love” with archive stuff. Kurniatun also participated in the selection of CPNS Vacancies for the formation of D3 Archives in 2004 held by UGM.
“Alhamdulillah, I successfully passed and was accepted by CPNS as a TURT Technician at the UGM Archives. Although I have been doing archivist work since 2005, my status as an archivist was brand-new in 2011,” she explained.
She viewed the digitizing archive at this time is very important to do. The UGM Archives Office maintains to do this to support archive services’ speed and protect the physical archives. According to her, currently, the archive service is required to be agile and precise. However, not all archives have been switched into digital form.
“Accordingly, all files must be transcribed so that they can be quickly found when we need it. Furthermore, during the Covid-19 pandemic, direct/face-to-face archive access services are limited so that we will improve the electronic archive services,” Kurniatun concluded.
Author: Agung Nugroho
Translator: Natasa A