YOGYAKARTA – The role or archivists is to document human and social experience. The emergence of new community in the virtual world sparks expectations that archivists share the role with society as archives in the community are not only archive sources but part of the identity of that community. “Archivists need to listen and talk to the community as the community has its own collective memory and distinct ways to manage and store archives,” said UGM archive expert, Drs. Machmoed Effendhie, M.Hum, in the national archiving seminar. Paradigm of Information Management and Records of Programmes in the Open Public Information Era at the UC UGM, Saturday (22/9).
In the development of new digital world, according to Machmoed, archivists need to change themselves from being an expert in official institutional documentation into being a mentor, facilitator who is able to work together with society. “The aim its to encourage archiving as a common participative process with many communities rather than waiting for an instruction from an official institution,” he said.
He added, therefore, professional archivists and experts along with state archiving institutions encourage society participation to maintain and treat their own archives to serve themselves and eventually to serve wider public interests.
Chairman of Indonesian Archives Association (AAI), Andi Kasman, S.E., M.M., said that archival openness as public information is the right of people to know and get information, right to see information, right to get copies and right to raise an objection if such right is rejected. Unfortunately, people’s access to get information in the open public information era has not been well-catered to.
He pointed out a KPK survey in terms of public information quality, as high as 72,1 % of central public institutions did not respond to public information requests. In the region, such requests were even transferred to other public institutions with the figure reaching 56,7%. It is even worse when discrimination occurs in public information service or difficult service when people do not pay a certain fee to the person giving the service.