The ACLIS draft position paper on ‘The need for the preservation of Australian-created machine readable records’, 1992 deals with the collecting responsibilities and roles of institutions, the categories of electronic records that should be collected, the need for working toward an understanding of the problems created by electronic records, and the need to provide guidelines for the ways and the forms in which these records may be preserved.This paper expands on these points from the general perspective of the archives community and gives an overview of the Australian Archives' recent work in this area.