Closed Access

Under the Australian Archives Act 1983 most Commonwealth records are opened to public scrutiny after twenty years (this was reduced from thirty years in 2010). But the Act also defines ‘exempt’ records that can be withheld from the public for a variety of reasons, including the defence of national security, and the protection of individual privacy. Access under the Act is not an inevitable destination, but a process that may result in records with the access status of ‘closed’. This project is examining ‘closed’ files to try and better understand how our access system works.

Recent updates

• Closed Access 2017 update, 18 Feb 2018
• Closed Access: Changes in 2016, 31 Dec 2017
• Relationships between reasons, 19 Jun 2016
• A way of measuring the conservatism of access decisions?, 19 Jun 2016
• TF-IDF analysis, 10 Jun 2016

Show all 17 notes.

Sites

• Closed Access

Code

• closed_access
• closedaccess-web

Datasets

• Files in the National Archives of Australia withheld from public access in 2015
  https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.2060052.v1
• Files in the National Archives of Australia withheld from public access (the complete Closed Access dataset)
  https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3443867.v1

Presentations and papers

• Closed Access, June 2016