Papua New Guinea needs proper centralised archive facilities in every region to keep proper data and records of the history of districts, provinces and government agencies.
Minister for Education Nick Kuman admitted that the Government has failed miserably in this area.
The National Libraries, Archives Records (NLAR) is one of the three entities under the Ministry of Education and plays an important function in the education system.
Kuman said a lot of statistics available in the country many years ago have not been put together in a centralized place for the use in the future.
He highlighted that researchers that come in to do research in the country are not able to obtain information from 50 years ago and that is the challenge for the Archives.
“We need to centralize archive facilities in every region so all information that need to be archived dating more than 10 years will be stored in archives,” Kuman said.
He hopes that the recent launch of the National Library, Archives and Records Services 10 Year Strategic Plan 2016-2025 will help in centralising archive services in the regions.
The Strategic Plan is the pathway of the organisation to reach out to the Government instrumentalities, the public, and school children of this country.
NLAR has developed a new organisational structure with increased staff of 601.
The current structure has 48 staff that are based in Port Moresby and Lae, 20 of the staff are support staff and 28 are technical staff.