Operations of public records dept must be commercialised
It has become imperative to review the Public Records and Archives Administration Act, 1997 (Act 535) to help commercialise some aspects of the operations of the Public Records and Archives Administration Department (PRAAD).
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The commercialisation of the department is to give it a free hand to work to reflect the current trend of record keeping and for it to be resourceful.
The Graphic Business gathered that for now, the PRAAD is only able to make a small amount annually from the psaltry fees it charges for its services, which a source said was not encouraging and did not help them to work well.
“If we should be given permission to use the internally generated funds, how is the one one cedis we charge going to yield? There are private records centres that are charging for their operations but here, the Ministries, Departments and agencies (MDAs) pay virtually nothing while the private organisations pay a token,” the source said.
Section 15 of the Act states that the director shall on the advice of the Advisory Committee, and with the approval of the council, determine fees payable for the supply of copies of records in his custody, the certification of copies and the provision of other services by the staff of the department.
By the law, patrons pay GH¢5 for storage of records annually and GH¢1 for request forms, among others.
“We are to manage public records from its creation to final disposition. If a person comes here to do a search and pays nothing except when he does a copy how much can we make? Now we are also made to foot our utility bills,” the source said.
The PRAAD was established under the PRAAD Instrument, 1996 (L.I. 1628) to be responsible for the proper and effective management of records in public institutions of the government to which the Act applies.
Capacity
The PRAAD, with a capacity of 80,000 repositories, currently has about 60,000 documents in storage.
Annually, it receives about 6,000 to 10, 000 boxes from the MDAs and about 4,000 from private organisations.
Therefore, the source said it was prudent that 20 years after its establishment and looking at the volume of documents in storage there will be the need to help them to expand.
“We need to expand to be able to store about one million files. The thing is as they are coming, some are being disposed off as we go through the merits of the records,” it said.
Relevance
The source said the PRAAD remained relevant in spite of its challenges.
“There is no capital, no computers to work with, no transport and no equipment for digitisation which is expensive. Some politicians and some Members of Parliament (MPs) frequent here to use our services but I’m surprised they are not advocating that the department be resourced,” he said.
The records centre keeps the records until they are ripe to be archived, which takes about 30 years.
A periodic reappraisal is carried out and documents of archival value are kept and the rest trashed out.