Sometimes you stumble across a piece of media that doesn’t just inform, it reorients. That happened to me watching the StoryKeepers interview with Adrian Cunningham, part of the Australian Society of Archivists’ 50th anniversary celebrations.
For many of us in the international records and archives community, Adrian is not simply an Australian voice — he’s a longtime colleague, a stalwart of ISO/TC 46/SC 11, and someone who has kept the flame burning around metadata, interoperability, and the subtle art of making standards useful. I’ve sat across tables from him in standards meetings, I’ve heard his sharp interventions on definitions, and I’ve seen how his steady voice often pulled discussions back to fundamentals: why we describe, how we describe, and who benefits from the frameworks we’re building.
A Career as a Mirror of the Profession
The interview traces Adrian’s professional journey, but what makes it powerful is how it mirrors the changes in recordkeeping itself.
“Records aren’t just bureaucratic detritus — they’re social evidence.”
He speaks to:
The transition from paper-based bureaucracies to digital landscapes.
The broadening of what “counts” as a record — moving from official documents to the messy, diverse, and sometimes ephemeral traces of human activity.
The struggle to make institutions responsive to communities, rather than mere custodians of their own paperwork.
Listening to him, I was struck by how his career arc is also a kind of metadata arc: what we record about records, and why, changes as society itself changes.
Metadata as Cultural Work
Adrian has long argued that metadata isn’t just technical scaffolding; it’s cultural infrastructure.
“Metadata is never neutral. It’s a set of judgments about what matters.”
The choices we make — what to capture, how to label, which schemas to privilege — reflect deeper values about memory, evidence, and accountability.
That point resonates beyond Australia. It’s echoed in SC 11’s metadata work, from the 23081 series on metadata for records to the more experimental conversations about interoperability and trust. Every time Adrian has leaned in at a standards table, he has brought the reminder that metadata is not simply data about data — it’s data about values.
The Importance of Community
One of the threads running through the StoryKeepers interview is Adrian’s gratitude for professional networks — mentors, colleagues, and especially the Australian Society of Archivists.
“The profession isn’t sustained by standards alone or archival infrastructure. It’s sustained by relationships.”
I couldn’t help but nod along. Having worked in SC 11 for years, I know how much of the real work happens not in the text of a standard, but in the conversations that shape it. Adrian has been part of those conversations for decades, and his reflections underline how much they matter.
Challenges and Hope
Of course, Adrian doesn’t sugarcoat the difficulties: the funding crunches, the speed of technological obsolescence, the constant balancing act between access and preservation.
“We can’t ignore the constraints. But we also can’t stop imagining new possibilities.”
These are the same challenges I hear echoed in meetings around the world. What makes Adrian’s voice so valuable is that mixture of realism and optimism. He sees promise in innovation, in collaboration, and in the ethical compass that keeps archivists returning to the same core question: whose voices are being remembered, and whose are at risk of being silenced?
Why This Conversation Matters
For me, the interview wasn’t just a personal story. It was a reminder of how interconnected our field is. Adrian’s reflections are part of a global conversation that stretches from Canberra to Washington to Geneva — about sustainability, inclusivity, and the evolving definition of a record.
“Archives is never only about the past. It’s about remembering forward.”
Watching him, I was reminded that our job as archivists isn’t only to safeguard what has been. It’s to set up the frameworks, the metadata, and the professional commitments that will help future communities make sense of their own histories.
🎥 Watch here: StoryKeepers – ASA 50th Anniversary – Interview with Adrian Cunningham