The Australian Women’s Register and the case of the missing apostrophe; or, how we learnt to stop worrying and love librarians^*

^*This paper has been double-blind peer reviewed to meet the Department of Higher Education’s Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) requirements.

Abstract

The Australian Women’s Register was established in 2000, in response to a strategy developed by the National Foundation for Australian Women and its associated Australian Women’s Archives Project. Now based at the University of Melbourne’s eScholarship Research Centre, the Register is a fully online archival resource dedicated to the preservation and promotion of the history of Australian women. This article traces the Register’s history from its inception to the present, and discusses its collaborative relationships with the University of Melbourne and the National Library of Australia and Trove.

Keywords:

• Australian Women’s Register
• Australian Women’s Archives Project (AWAP)
• collaboration
• digital archives
• feminism
• resource/information discovery
• Trove

Introduction

In March 2000, the National Foundation for Australian Women (NFAW) established a project to support the preservation of Australian women’s archival material. Announcing the arrival of the Australian Women’s Archives Project (AWAP) as an ‘exciting development for the Australian women’s movement,’ project worker Elle Morrell and NFAW board member Patricia ní Ivor proudly proclaimed the project’s feminist intentions: ‘Too often the hard work and recognition of Australian women’s individual and collective achievements remain unrecognised’ (Morrell & ní Ivor, 2000, p. 7). An approach by well-known Melbourne feminist Mary Owen, who was concerned about the fate of her personal papers and some organisational archives in her keeping (papers of the Working Women’s Centre Melbourne and the Victorian branch of the Women’s Electoral Lobby), galvanised the board to seek a sustainable solution to the mounting problem of what to do with Australian women’s archival heritage. In 2000, increasing numbers of women and organisations active in the second wave of feminism were working towards having their papers preserved. The NFAW developed a four-pronged strategy in response:

(a)	to establish a fund to support the preservation of papers;
(b)	to convene a reference group of experts representing a broad range of interests to advise on papers that should be preserved;
(c)	to establish state-based committees that brought together historians, archivists, librarians and volunteers to advise the community outside established repositories and administer funded projects; and
(d)	to establish a web-based register to publicise the location and content of women’s material (NFAW, 2000, p. 5).

Not only were the NFAW concerned about preservation, they wanted to promote Australian women’s material and make it accessible. Previous efforts towards this end had come in the form of published guides to archives in public repositories (Daniels, Murnane, & Picot, 1977; Fernon & Slee, 1984; Sawer, 1992). These guides understood the need not only to preserve, but to locate and describe materials ‘to make apparent their specific usefulness to the study of women’ (Daniels et al., 1977, p. v). The NFAW board understood there was a new archival space to work in, the digital space, and they planned to take full advantage of this potential by developing an online register of material. The advantage of this strategy was ‘that it gives open access to Australian women’s histories and stories, as well as identifying where archival holdings are located’ (Morrell & ní Ivor, 2000, p. 7). Describing the register as a form of ‘clearing house’, they explained how it would link existing catalogues of women’s papers in national, state and university libraries with the records of individuals and smaller, more marginal organisations often overlooked by major repositories.

Presaging Kate Eichhorn, who argues that ‘item-level cataloguing of marginal materials holds more potential for subversion than simply digitizing the same materials’ (Eichhorn, 2013, p. 23), the NFAW always conceptualised the project as one ‘born digital’, and one that prioritised accessibility, as opposed to creating a physical archive. By establishing the AWAP, a project that was national in scope, inclusive in approach and digital by design, it aimed to protect, preserve, promote and make accessible the records, and therefore the history, of Australian women. In so doing, it made explicit the centrality of history and feminism to the NFAW’s foundational purpose: to ensure that ‘the aims and ideals of the women’s movement and its collective wisdom are handed on to new generations of women’ (http://www.nfaw.org/who-we-are/history/). As well as being ‘born digital’, the AWAP was designed to be an activist project, one that shared knowledge while it created it.

This article tells the story of that ‘powerful tool’, the Australian Women’s Register (AWR, http://www.womenaustralia.info), an important feminist research infrastructure project that has supported academic and amateur historians since 2000. While focusing on the digital strand of the NFAW’s overall strategy, it references the other three by examining the longstanding and critical collaboration between grassroots feminist organisation the NFAW and the University of Melbourne. A model of the infinite possibilities of cross-sector research collaboration, it is also a model of activism in the archives and its consequent research potential.

The bigger picture

The AWR did not develop in a vacuum. It built upon and complemented the work of likeminded feminist activists who, in the pre-digital age, sought custodial solutions that often began with the simple act of documenting what was there. In 2007, Bartlett, Dever and Henderson surveyed the territory again, noting that while major repositories, such as the National Library of Australia (NLA) and university archival collections, for instance, the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland and the University of Melbourne Archives, had developed substantial holdings of women’s records of national and academic interest, the intervening decade had seen a growth in specialist libraries and collections (Bartlett, Dever, & Henderson, 2007). Established in 1989, the Jessie Street National Women’s Library, located in Sydney, is a physical space run by a committee of (mainly) women whose mission is to ‘provide for the Australian community a specialist library which collects, preserves and promotes the awareness of the cultural heritage of Australian women, facilitating learning, research and communication’ (http://www.nationalwomenslibrary.org).

Bartlett, Dever and Henderson’s survey revealed the extent to which archival holdings relating to Australian women, particularly those of the Second Wave Feminist movement, developed, observing the variability of holdings across place and genre. Despite this variability, they also observed ‘three recurring characteristics of the extant Australian feminist archive’, notably that it is ‘dispersed in location, fragmentary in nature, and those specialist feminist collections that do exist are usually unfunded and/or rely on volunteer labour resulting in holdings that are sometimes uncatalogued, difficult to access and often not well-known beyond local networks’ (Bartlett et al., 2007). Arguably, the situation has become more challenging as budgetary and physical space pressures on official repositories increases, inhibiting their capacity to take on even more material. The AWAP, as a digital, non-custodial model of curation, is designed to offer solutions relating to the dispersed and fragmentary nature of women’s records. But like all underfunded organisations, it confronts challenges as it does so.

Relationship with the University of Melbourne

The University of Melbourne’s eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC) and its predecessor organisations, the Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre (Austehc, 1999–2006) and Australian Science Archives Project (ASAP, 1985–1999), have provided a physical home, in-kind support and visionary guidance to the AWAP and the AWR since their inception. Gavan McCarthy and Helen Morgan, director and research fellow respectively of the ESRC (and both archivists), were original members of the AWAP reference group. McCarthy was also an inaugural member, and remains a member, of the project’s Board of Management. The two key strands of the core work of the then ASAP informed the development of the AWAP – the uncommon non-custodial approach to archives and the dissemination online of archival metadata as a continual work in progress.

The non-custodial model of facilitating the archiving and documentation of women’s papers was based on the successful model pioneered by McCarthy and ASAP in 1985 (Ellis, 1993, pp. 15, 195, 196). This involved providing guidance on preserving records still in private hands, documenting the content and location of these records (and those in public collections), making some of these data publicly available, brokering custody with cultural institutions to find homes for the records, and fund raising from external sources to support this process.

State-based local committees were crucial in the early years of the project to raising funds, writing countless applications to philanthropic trusts and requests to individual donors. Vital support came from the Vice Chancellor of the University of Melbourne in 2000, in the form of a $30,000 grant to AWAP via Austehc. This facilitated the curation of known archival collections (such as the Mary Owen papers) and supported the activities of a project officer who could then research, create and publish data in the Register about these papers and the women and organisations that produced them. The project was then funded in 2001–2002 by the Commonwealth Government Office of the Status of Women to research the details of Australian women who received Imperial honours in the twentieth century. Register content, including fully researched written biographies of a selection of the 4793 women recipients listed, linked to further bibliographical and archival resources, was significantly increased by this project, named Faith, Hope and Charity.

Importantly, the enthusiastic reception of this online exhibition inspired a successful model to adapt for future applications for funds. Potential funding bodies were impressed by the value of publishing online, particularly with regard to the potential to reach audiences nationally and internationally. Since then, the AWAP has been awarded numerous grants from Commonwealth, State and local government organisations, charitable organisations and private individuals to complete thematic exhibitions based on research focusing on specific groups of women, such as women in sport, women journalists, rural women and women in parliament. Fifteen of the 20 exhibitions currently accessible via the Register were made possible by local committee fundraising. The other five were made possible because the local committees offered support to the University of Melbourne via ARC Linkage and LIEF grant applications, one involving eleven partner organisations (including four national collecting institutions) across the country (ARC Linkage LP100200304, resulting in the 2014 publication The Encyclopedia of Women & Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia). In the course of completing all of these projects, along with establishing important networks between academic and collecting institutions across Australia, important information about women’s records kept in private hands has been uncovered, recorded and forwarded to repositories, thus fulfilling the feedback circle.

The Register and OHRM

The Register was identified from the beginning as critical to achieving the project’s goals, and not primarily for its potential as a publishing (and therefore fundraising) platform. It was specifically modelled (informatically) on the ASAP/Austehc online publication Bright Sparcs (later reworked and renamed The Encyclopedia of Australian Science). The Register used the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), developed by Austehc for Bright Sparcs (Evans, 1999), to manage and publish its data. The OHRM follows the ISAAR(CPF) standard for creating authority records about people, organisations, events and concepts (ISAAR(CPF), 1995). The key to its utility lies in its separation of biographical, bibliographical and archival metadata, treating these descriptions of subjects and resources as unique entries that can be related to one another. In this way, for example, a citation to a resource, rather than being entered repeatedly for each woman in the Register who is referenced by that resource, is entered once, becoming an entry in its own right. Links are created between the resource and the women. Relationships are not only made between women and resources, but also between women and women, women’s organisations, and even concepts such as woman suffrage, women in the development of Canberra’s sporting history, and deaconess orders. In this way, new relationships are potentially exposed.

Another key functionality of the OHRM, important from the very beginning to AWAP, was the ability to add multiple ‘functions’ for organisations, or ‘occupations’ for people, built organically alongside the data. Through its reference group (historians, librarians, archivists and women’s organisations), AWAP identified occupational classification problems in the changing work patterns of women as a priority data issue. And although in its earliest stages, the project was focused specifically on second wave feminism, the reference group determined a holistic approach, through occupational classification, to the rest of women’s lives and achievements, not just to be bound by the feminist part of it (Personal email correspondence from M. Burn to AWAP reference group, 15 September 2000). In 2015, Register staff were contacted by an American academic who wished to use the occupation lists as a seed for her own work, stating that ‘yours is the first that I have found that deals with the many ways women “worked” without an “occupation”’ (Personal email correspondence from C.M. Hajo to AWR, 5 September 2015). This need, identified by AWAP early on, fed into Austehc’s development of the OHRM. (The Register currently publishes under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, which required this contact for permission to be made, while its sister publication The Encyclopedia of Women & Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia operates under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. Licensing fit to the purpose of the Register is under review.)

The contextual metadata about women, their organisations, publications and archives is also published from the OHRM directly to the web, and easily updateable. Within months of the project starting in 2000, the first register was online containing entries on a handful of women. This version was originally hosted under the NFAW domain and called simply ‘Australian Women’s Archives Project’. (The structure only of this early website can be viewed at the Internet Archive (http://web.archive.org/web/20010425060514/http://www.nfaw.org/archive-p/home.htm), while the full 2002 version, hosted under the current domain of www.womenaustralia.info, can be viewed through the NLA’s Pandora archive (http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/24001/20020531-0000/www.womenaustralia.info/browse.htm).) The site was redesigned and rebranded the AWR in 2009, fittingly relaunched by Governor General Quentin Bryce. Since then, the Register has been clearly co-branded in the by-line as an initiative of the NFAW in conjunction with the University of Melbourne, acknowledging the original support of the University and continued support through the ESRC and Professor Patricia Grimshaw, from the University’s history department.

The role of the University and the ESRC has been critical to the survival and success of AWAP and the Register, but it has been a mutually beneficial relationship. How to present, sustain and re-present research data such as the Register is an area of critical importance to the research community and beyond. This is what drives the ESRC. The long-standing collaboration with AWAP on many projects, large and small, along with the significant curated data-set that is the Register, have positioned the ESRC well to examine and meet these challenges.

Relationship with NLA/Trove – the Register as research infrastructure

The ESRC, in collaboration with Professor Patricia Grimshaw, secured an Australian Research Council Linkage Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities grant (ARC LIEF LE0882889) in 2008 to explore the Register as part of a federated information architecture to support historical scholarship in digital and networked environments. One outcome of the research, led by ESRC staff member Joanne Evans, was the establishment of a mechanism for harvesting Encoded Archival Context (EAC-CPF, 2011) records from the Register into the NLA’s then soon to be released national discovery service Trove.

As a result, the Register was the first external data-set harvested into Trove. (The Register also provided one of the first data-sets integrated into the HuNI Linked Data store.) It was the test case during the development phase of the Trove project, chosen for the size and quality of the data-set for identity mapping purposes, for the highly related nature of the data, the power of its curated relationships, and for the resource discovery strengths of the ESRC’s informatics model underpinning it. As an action research project, this particular work undertaken by the ESRC with the NLA – and the ongoing work on the Register itself – embodies and is embedded within the research agenda of the ESRC; the ESRC has, again, derived much benefit from the relationship.

The benefits for researchers are many. Harvesting external data into discovery services like Trove has allowed

a rich multiplicity and variety of voices to contribute their knowledge to resource discovery systems. It involves scholar’s direct participation in resource description frameworks allowing their extensive, intimate and fine grained knowledge of sources and their relationships to areas of study to become part of networked information infrastructure. It also … provide[s] a mechanism by which the flow of information about resources in and out of cultural institutions is improved, allowing researchers to discover, explore and make connections between materials held in disparate locations efficiently and effectively, and in turn to feed that knowledge back into the network. (Evans, Morgan, & Henningham, 2010)

In other words, the priority for the AWAP is to curate and make accessible information about women, regardless of whether that information is unearthed by academic or amateur researchers. The example of Ina Higgins provides a magnificent case study of how this works. The Register had no entry on her, but her name appeared in passing in an entry on Architecture and Design in the Register’s online sister publication The Encyclopedia of Women & Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia (Swain & Smart, 2014). As a result, independent garden historian Sandi Pullman contacted the Register and offered to write a detailed biographical entry on Ina. There was already a person record for Ina in Trove (‘Higgins, Frances Georgina (1860–1948)’) with the field of activity ‘Landscape Gardener’.

In the early days of the Register, the intention was to contribute occupations (fields of activity) to the thesaurus used by the Register of Australian Archives and Manuscripts (RAAM) maintained by the NLA’s manuscripts section. RAAM, along with its occupations thesaurus, was retired sometime late in 2009 after 12 years online, subsumed into Trove. This contribution ultimately did occur through the harvesting of Register metadata records into Trove, with Register occupations assigned to individual women added to their person record in Trove, complementing those harvested from other Trove contributors (there were 37 external contributors at the time of writing). This is clear in the before (Figure 1) and after (Figure 3) harvest screenshots for Ina Higgins, where to the existing Landscape Gardener, four more occupations have been added: Landscape gardener, Suffragist, Feminist, Women’s rights activist (duplication/case issues were being addressed by the Trove team at the time of writing).

Figure 1. Trove record for Ina Higgins, before harvest of Register data, showing limited biographical information from Obituaries Australia, 0 resources and 1 field of activity.

Other than the link to Obituaries Australia (displaying only a small snippet of content harvested from the Obituaries Australia article, a choice of that contributor), there are no resources listed for Ina under Resources (Figure 1), but a newspaper article has been privileged under Digitised newspapers because a third party user (not our independent historian but yet another researcher interested in Ina and/or her family) has tagged the article ‘Frances Georgina Watts (Ina) Higgins (1860–1948)’ (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Trove record for Ina Higgins, before harvest of Register data, showing tagged newspaper resource.

Once the entry on Ina was published in the Register, it was included in the tri-weekly cycle of harvests into Trove. Fields of activity from her Register entry appeared as additional fields of activity in her Trove person record, along with all the entry content (Figure 3), including, importantly, most of the archival and published resources related to Ina in her Register entry (Figure 4). These resource relationships had been determined relevant by the author of Ina’s Register entry.

Figure 3. Trove record for Ina Higgins, after harvest of Register data, showing multiple fields of activity and more biographical information.

Figure 4. Trove record for Ina Higgins, after harvest of Register data, showing 23 (curated) related resources.

Data within the description harvested from the Register becomes searchable within Trove. At the time of writing, searching for ‘Ina Higgins’ in Trove returns two person records, one for Ina and one for Cecilia John, because John’s entry contains the string ‘Along with Ina Higgins’. The relationship hadn’t been made explicit by Register staff in their data entry (limited time available, simply overlooked) but searching all the content in the Register would at least have revealed the relationship. Allowing the harvest of all available Register content (not merely a short snippet) means the relationship is also revealed within the broader national research context of Trove. (For researchers of Ina Higgins at least – Cecilia John’s name does appear in Ina’s Register entry, harvested into Trove, but on first publication and harvest was misspelt Cecelia, meaning the relationship was not revealed in Trove searching on ‘Cecilia John’.) Unless made explicit by content partners, Trove does not extract relationship data between people/organisations automatically, hence the value in harvesting both relationship and other contextual data from resources like the Register.

The case of the missing apostrophe

The situation for AWAP and the Register in 2016 is much as it has been for the course of its existence: financially precarious. An ARC grant on trailblazing women lawyers is in its final six months and will result in the addition of more than 300 women and countless new resources to the Register (as well as 45 oral history interviews lodged with the NLA). The process has challenged staff to review policies around presentation, privacy and data retention. Staff await the funding outcome of another large ARC grant on rural women and the opportunities it may bring. Meanwhile, the local AWAP committee in Canberra have diverted funds raised from their series of annual talks at the National Library to support the employment of a casual employee one day a week for six months to update data. Outside of the grant-funded work, this is the only paid work being done at present on the Register.

When queries are received asking why a certain woman is not in the Register or more is not included about an entry, the standard follow-up is: no recurrent operational budget; content built around the priorities set by the funding sources; takes time to do the required research and writing; do not have the resources to improve existing entries beyond fixing mistakes and adding links. In return, Register staff often ask these correspondents for help: we agree that xxxx xxxxxx is a woman worthy of recognition – do you have more information, including photographs, you can share; if you were able to help us with resources, it would shorten the preparation cycle significantly; would you be interested in writing a better entry for us that could supplement the summary note we have.

Most of the time, this elicits no response. Staff are grateful when it does and this is the process followed recently for one such entry received. There is the usual editorial to and fro accompanying factual writing between the author of the entry and Register staff, seeking clarification about content and sources. Staff rely on the entry’s author to cite all sources used in putting together the entry. Given the origins of the Register in the AWAP, staff clearly identify original unique archival materials, and check bibliographical citations against cataloguing-in-publication data. Existing Register data are interrogated in order to identify related entries and citations, and the often tortuous process of establishing whether the supplier of photographic material actually owns the reproduction rights begins. The financial cost of turning such entries written and researched by external contributors runs to well over $600.

One long entry (researched in the contributor’s own time and freely given) was published in the Register. Not long after, tepid praise and a complaint about lack of acknowledgement of the correspondent’s archival repository in the entry and a missing apostrophe in the name of the correspondent’s institution, included in the text of the entry, was forthcoming. This feedback was disheartening. The contributor advised that the archival material provided to her had not been useful, and she had not, in fact, used it in writing the entry (nor was it archival). The only material used, provided by the complainant archivist, was from a publication held in the archives and available (according to Trove) in at least two other libraries. This publication had been included in the sources.

What, then, is the function of the Register and its relationship with external sources? The home page states that it is ‘a rich and growing source of information about Australian women and their organisations’. What is the point of the more than ten thousand curated references to external sources and the separation of those sources (informatically) from the encyclopedia-style entries on women in the online environment? Separation of biographical, relationship and source data makes possible the discovery of new connections and structures data in a way that facilitates aggregation and re-use by discovery services like Trove. Curating those sources both acknowledges those used (and their usefulness) and establishes enough information at least to help others locate and verify the information themselves. This disambiguates where confusion might arise, lays a trail for those who follow, and ensures records and publications can be found, used and re-used.

This is one reason the missing apostrophe complaint was disappointing. The Register and its citation of sources are about more than ticking off acknowledgements. Authority records should, of course, be authoritative. Not infallible, and remembering the goals of promotion and access, the Register aims not only to provide the authority form of a name if it can, but alternative names (such as maiden names, nicknames, pseudonyms, abbreviations, even occasionally common misspellings of names) to facilitate discovery. In the case of the missing apostrophe, the organisation in question was mentioned only in the body of the text of a person entry and had no entry of its own – and yet it should (in an ideally funded world), because it is an organisation of enough importance to the history of women’s education in Australia to merit inclusion. After making that correction staff checked the Register data and turned up 37 person entries mentioning the organisation, 16 of which were apostrophe-less, but it turned out that the organisation existed in more than one state, and each required verification to determine their use of the apostrophe. There were no entries on any of the organisations in the Register, so no possibility of disambiguating which organisation was being referenced, and no way to document the network of possible connections between alumni of those organisations. Undertaking basic research revealed the Register to be incorrect in one example, based perhaps on an error in a source, or an assumption about the commonness of the name (Ladies’ for Girls’), and a data entry slip up. The entry is linked to from Wikipedia and has been harvested into Trove, multiplying the ‘authoritativeness’ of the error. A university archive repository’s description of the woman’s records also has the name of the educational organisation incorrect. Did they use the Register as a source, or use the same possibly incorrect source the Register did? Unfortunately, the archive repository did not cite their sources or date their biographical note. Ultimately, the missing apostrophe complaint would have been more helpful if accompanied by the offer to write an entry on the organisation and identify all the related women in the Register, accompanied by sufficient funds to cover the cost of integrating the data.

If its purpose is not understood by users, then the Register, despite its longevity, still has a way to go in honing its design. The trickle of queries mistaking the Register for the organisation itself (rather than a ‘biographical’ entry about the organisation) or a library (despite a relatively prominent link to Trove in entries that have been harvested by Trove) indicates that the interface and connectedness with external resources could be better. The Register itself is now an archive in its own right of more than fifteen years’ worth of citation metadata of online resources – an invaluable source for scholars wishing to trace disappeared sources through the Wayback Machine. For many years, a direct link from the Register to the URL in the Wayback Machine has been on the development wish list, but more pressing functionality, driven by specific funded project needs ESRC staff have been working on, has taken precedence.

While the major achievement of working with Trove and the NLA stands, the ESRC, still maintaining and developing the OHRM (the database underpinning the Register), has been unable to keep up with the continued developments of this service by the Library because the demand has not been there in the major funded projects currently being undertaken. And yet, data are still being harvested by Trove from OHRM-created xml output from the AWR and the ESRC’s Encyclopedia of Australian Science, contributing in total more than 12,000 records about Australians and their organisations.

The Australian archival community has tried grappling with concerns around federated access to information about archival holdings and found them overwhelming. Perhaps, though, the lead was never theirs to take and it needed the library lens, as evidenced by the NLA’s Trove discovery service, to succeed – connecting people with information regardless of the perceived obstacles of the nuances of bibliographical versus archival description, and opening up the notion of authority data to become a shared concern.

Conclusion

In a speech delivered at the 2009 relaunch of the revamped Australian Women’s Register, Australia’s then Governor-General, the Honourable Quentin Bryce AC CVO, observed that ‘One of the main scholarly tasks of the last half century has been to retrieve women’s history from its “unspokenness”, from the shrouds of silence and obscurity’. Referring to the reflections on history of feminist writers Adrienne Rich and Dale Spender, she talked about how important the work that historians, local historical groups, online communities and feminist organisations was to ‘reconstructing and construing’ a ‘continuous public record’ of women’s historical experience and achievements in Australia. Crucially, she observed that ‘The reconstructive process is necessarily a collaborative one’. As major repositories work to identify and publicise what lies in their holdings, individuals and small organisations ‘[bring] to bear our intimate records, letters, images, precisely those precious, difficult-to-come-by things that make the past eloquent’. Records, public and private, big and small, textual and visual, concrete and ephemeral, enrich and inform us; but only if we keep them safe and only if we know about them. The collaborative networking model of operation, through communities and in the digital space adopted by the AWAP from the beginning still carries enormous potential for ‘speaking what has been unspoken, indeed of singing the praises of remarkable Australian women’ (Bryce, 2009, n.p.).

However, in an age where online discovery services and family history tools like Ancestry.com give everyone the potential to be enriched and informed by historical research, and popular culture, through programs such as Who do you think you are? and Restoration Rescue, informs people of the value of records, the pressure to find solutions to the problem of physical preservation is mounting. When AWAP project officers give talks about the work they do and leave the venue with car loads of archival boxes, donated by women who want the traces of their lives preserved in case their children do not recognise the value of the records once they are gone, we know we have an issue. We had hoped that the register model of publicising the existence of records in private hands might prove useful; the reality is that by the time they are ready to make their material public, most women are also ready to part with it. Indeed, that is their preference.

This is a real concern for the AWAP as it moves into its sixteenth year. Funding is needed to both digitise and house real records. Whilst the AWAP still prioritises accessibility over preservation, we do need to ask ourselves – will there be anything left to make accessible in 20 years if nothing is preserved? In Victoria, there have been initiatives to create, quite literally, concrete solutions to this problem. The Women’s HERitage Victoria initiative, for instance, launched in August 2015, aims to create a physical space where Victorian women’s cultural heritage could be preserved and promoted, building on the work and networks already established by the AWAP (Women’s HERitage Victoria, 2015).

The AWAP will continue to do what it started to do 16 years ago: run a collaborative, inclusive project in order to reflect the diversity of experience of Australian women across time and place. While it is doing this from its precarious position in the ESRC at the University of Melbourne, it will continue to ‘assert the value of scholarly principles, re-visioned, re-imagined and re-distributed for the digital and networked age’ while it cements women’s history ‘firmly in the mainstream rather than being consigned to the margins’ (Evans, 2010, p. 15).

Addendum

Since we completed this article, Trove has undergone a major upgrade, which incorporated search fixes. A person search on Ina Higgins now reveals Ina’s relationship to Vida Goldstein. This is because the data being searched since the upgrade includes the resource descriptions supplied by contributors, a great demonstration of the value that external content providers bring to this piece of national research infrastructure. However, around this time, Trove users and contributors were dismayed to learn of the impact budget cuts at the National Library may have upon the Trove discovery service. At the time of writing staffing, cuts meant that Trove would not be able to take on any new content partners after June 2016. As an existing contributor, the Register’s data will still be harvested, but if the current harvest process fails or needs upgrading, the Trove service is no longer resourced to make the necessary adjustments in response to be able to keep that data flowing. A range of business models is being investigated by the Library to maintain and grow the Trove service, but a solution is still some time from being realised. During the run up to the 2016 federal election, Trove became an election issue, with both the Australian Labor Party and the Greens promising to #fundTrove should they be elected.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Nikki Henningham is a historian dedicated to making the historical lives of Australian women discoverable online. As Executive Officer of the Australian Women’s Archives Project, based at the eScholarship Research Centre at the University of Melbourne, she has been developing content for the Australian Women’s Register since 2003, most recently for the first online encyclopedia of Australian Women and Leadership. She received the 2005 National Archives of Australia’s Ian McLean award for her work with Australian migrant women’s records.

Helen Morgan is a research fellow at the University of Melbourne eScholarship Research Centre. She has worked as information architect and exhibition designer on the Australian Women’s Archives Project since its inception in 2000. Her current concerns include the collecting, collating and curating of personal, private and public domain biographical data and (re)presenting it online in a century of waning privacy. Helen is a passionate advocate for sharing research data with Trove.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge AWAP and ESRC staff, past and present, who have worked on and supported the Australian Women’s Register: Elle Morrell, Patricia ní Ivor, Clare Land, Anne Heywood, Jane Carey, Rosemary Francis, Annette Alafaci, Barbara Lemon, Caitlin Stone, Joanne Evans, Gavan McCarthy and Ailie Smith. We acknowledge also Cathy Moran Hajo, Sandra Pullman and Julia Hickie. We also wish to acknowledge the unwavering support and enthusiasm of the NFAW and AWAP local committees (particularly those in Canberra and Melbourne), Professor Patricia Grimshaw and the eScholarship Research Centre at the University of Melbourne.

Notes

^* This paper has been double-blind peer reviewed to meet the Department of Higher Education’s Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) requirements.