A two-day training to assist staff from various Government Ministries improve their record keeping practices has concluded with the facilitators hopeful that the new knowledge will be put into practice.

The training was run by the Ministry of Education Sports and Culture through its National Archives and Records Authority Division and convened at the Ministry’s Aute conference room in Malifa.

M.E.S.C. Chief Executive Officer, Afamasaga Karoline Fuata’i, told the Samoa Observer that the N.A.R.A. Division within their Ministry is working in partnership with Government organisations and Ministries.

“They have  capacity building and training with records staff of Samoa in public entities and ministries,” she said.

“The current records are normally the ones within 10 years period, after 10 years it becomes archives and it's time to sort it out for digitization. 

“There will be no digitized records and archives if the current record was not doing properly. “We use databases to do the list as we bring out the boxes and go through the big process of creating the records, classified list and digitized. 

“We are trying to complete our policy framework to briefly explain to the people of Samoa and record officers of how important their work is.”

Afamasaga indicated that they have some challenges such as missing records which can compel one to consider having another committee to address the issue.

“Our policies framework has guidelines called National Archives and Records framework with three section: records, archives, digitization and will submit it to the Parliament for approval.” 

The Assistant C.E.O. of the Ministry’s N.A.R.A. Division, Fanuaea Amere Silipa, added that the two-day training was run in order to expand the knowledge of the participating officers and to make them aware of the importance of record keeping.

“If the records are not completely gathered, it will be wrong information given out to the people. 

“We also brought in a semi government organization to obtain more knowledge and we strongly focus on the law approved by Government or the Public Records Acts 2007 and 2011 to be a guideline for every work. 

“Hopefully after two days training, all the ministries and organisations went back and practiced what we shared so far to improve their work in different workplaces.”