I’ve created a new dataset containing 10 years of data that can be used to explore the workings of the National Archives of Australia’s access examination system.

Australian government records become available for public access after 20 years. But before being opened to the public, records go through a process known as access examination to determine whether they should be withheld, either partially or completely. The grounds for exemption are laid out in the Archives Act and include things like national security and personal privacy. If a record is completely withheld from access, the NAA’s database, RecordSearch, records its access status as ‘closed’.

On or about 1 January every year since 2016, I’ve harvested details of files in RecordSearch with the access status of ‘closed’. On the day when the media is full of revelations from the public release of the latest batch of cabinet records, I thought it was important to find out what we couldn’t see, as well as what we could. I’ve now published all the annual harvests as a dataset on Zenodo.

It’s important to note that records can be re-examined and their access status can change. Also some ‘closed’ files are actually ‘withheld pending advice’ – in these cases a final access decision hasn’t been made as the NAA has referred the files to their controlling agencies for advice. This means that this dataset should be treated as providing annual snapshots of an active system, not a cumulative record of closed files. Some of the complexities of the access examination system revealed by this data are discussed in the Inside Story article ‘Withheld pending advice’. I’m hoping to do some more analysis later this year.