The recordkeeping and archival needs for childhood out-of-home care are part of one of society’s wicked problems, namely how to ensure that the systems set up to protect children from abuse and neglect do not themselves cause harm? That makes the envisioning, designing and building an integrated archival and recordkeeping infrastructure for child centred out-of-home care a major social design challenge.
In this Big Ideas seminar, Professor Sue McKemmish and Dr Joanne Evans from Monash University provide an overview of the ‘Setting the Record Straight for the Rights of the Child Summit’ which was held on the 8-9 May 2017 at Federation Square in Melbourne Australia. As a statement event its aim was to bring together community, organisational, government and professional perspectives to discuss how to transform the way records for childhood out-of-home care are created, captured, managed, and accessed to meet lifelong identity, memory and accountability needs. With participants at the Summit committing to a vision of participatory recordkeeping in which multiple rights in records are represented and enacted, we will outline the strategic plan that has since been developed. It centres on working towards the development of a National Framework for Recordkeeping for Childhood Out-of-Home Care by 2020, and to pursue its implementation, monitoring and evaluation over the following decade.
They are joined by Professor Elizabeth Shepherd, from the Department of Information Studies at UCL, who is speaking on ‘Navigating the Information Rights Ecology: A UK Perspective’.