Abstract
The eScholarship Research Centre at the University of Melbourne was established in 2007 but its origins can be traced back to the foundation of the Australian Science Archives Project in 1985. In its 2015 review, the Centre stated its four key activities as engagement, scholarly services, research and collaboration. What identified the Centre as different from other research centres was that it was not located in a faculty but within the University Library. At the same time, the Centre was different from the other units of the Library because it maintained its largely self-funded business model and its commitment to helping build national information infrastructure to support research. So while most of the Library was inward looking to support the specific needs of staff and students of the University, the Centre had a tradition of looking outwards, collaborating beyond the borders of the campus and seeking out colleagues with similar goals across the globe. What started as a national information infrastructure project to support the study of the history of Australian science and technology became a research programme in its own right, as the rampant development of digital technologies started the radical transformation of the information landscape. The emergence of social and cultural informatics as a discipline provided the intellectual backdrop for the research agenda for the Centre, with its strengths in archival science and over-arching interests in the challenges of intergenerational transfer of knowledge.
Introduction
This short paper provides an overview of the story of the Australian Science Archives Project (ASAP, 1985–1999), the Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre (Austehc, 1999–2006) and the eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC, 2007–2013). This paper is accompanied by a select bibliography of that period, published in this issue. Research into the combined published output of ASAP, Austehc and the ESRC identified around 500 items. The select bibliography is built around the four publication types (guides to archival collections, newsletters, journal articles, books or book chapters) that best represent both the stable and evolving aspects of the work done over that period. The publication types not included in this select bibliography are web resources, conference papers, client reports, software, physical exhibitions and oral history interviews.
The authors of this paper include the two longest serving members of the ASAP–Austehc–ESRC succession, with McCarthy appointed to establish ASAP in 1985 and Morgan joining in 1996. As would be expected over such a long period, learnings based on experiences and communicated as anecdotes played a significant role in the evolution of the organisations. Enduring themes such as the battle for funding, the unpredictable and unstable leadership from the scientific community, a frustration with the archival community, the cognitive dissonance of the University environment, the critical role of international engagement and the intellectual and practical challenges of understanding and utilising contextual information, all contributed to the stories that were told, creating a sense of cohesion, common goals and purpose. Although at the day-to-day, month-to month, year-to-year levels it felt like a reactive struggle to survive, and still does, in hindsight we became aware of a longer seven-year cycle of organisational evolution that not only helped us understand what had gone before, but also to think about planning for the future. Our work on the records of leading scientists with long and influential careers and major society-changing innovations, such as the plastic banknote and the bionic ear, added a further dimension to this continuous cycle of reflection and self-understanding.
This paper uses the bibliographic data, in association with data on projects and staff, to examine the anecdotes and self-told stories. The analysis itself becomes a reflection on the more recent evolution of the ESRC as a research centre, as we engaged more directly with researchers in an ever-increasing range of disciplines. The ESRC’s focus on archival context as a driver for building cross-institutional information infrastructure was intrinsically network-oriented and this, when combined with emerging digital technologies, provided innovative research methodologies and visual analytic possibilities that appealed to researchers in history, education, social work, Aboriginal studies and culture and communications.
ASAP 1985 to 1992: establishment, exploration and experimentation
Although ASAP was based in an academic setting, the Department of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) at the University of Melbourne, its purpose was to provide services (information infrastructure) to support research, not to conduct and publish the outcomes of research. Despite this, ASAP did contribute a small number of scholarly articles, mostly in the area of archival science (Figure ). More than 50% of the output comprised knowledge transfer instruments (guides and client reports) and 40% comprised general communication with our key audience (scientists, science-based organisations and archivists).
Figure 1. Publication types of the Australian Science Archives Project 1985–1992.
During this period, ASAP introduced the use of digital tools, in particular PC-based relational database systems, and was able to test their utility in the archival science sector. Prior to this, databases for archival purposes were the province of only the largest institutions. Our experiments at the time revealed that the information and data models, especially those developed by the National Archives of Australia, translated well to smaller scales and could be effectively utilised in personal desktop and laptop environments, although the computational and data storage capabilities were very limited.
ASAP 1992 to 1999: expansion and extension
In 1992, building on the impact of the Guide to Archives of Science in Australia, Records of Individuals (McCarthy, Citation1991), along with an increasing number of institutional-based records, documentation projects and support from key researchers in HPS, ASAP started looking at how it could extend its influence. Tim Sherratt, by now a well-entrenched ASAP leader, was keen to set up a Canberra office and utilise the proximity of national scientific and archival institutions, the National Library of Australia and the federal government. Funding from a research infrastructure support grant in 1992 enabled this to happen.
Although the use of digital technologies was part of the fabric of ASAP from the beginning, the emergence of the web in 1993–1994 changed everything. This is seen in Figure , with 11% of output classified as web resources. This term, not common at the time, is now used to group together a range of new born-digital publication genres. Archival guides remained a staple output, although they were now being published digitally. Client reports increased significantly (to 37%), principally driven by the extensive work the Melbourne branch of ASAP did for the State Electricity Commission of Victoria when the Victorian State Government privatised the power generators. The project manager for this large-scale enterprise was Joanne Evans, who not only brought an undergraduate degree in science, but also post-graduate degrees in archives and records management and computer science. This combination of large projects and enhanced capability enabled ASAP to continue to develop its digital tools and services in an increasingly fast-changing web-driven world, but it also created strategic challenges.
Figure 2. Publication types of the Australian Science Archives Project 1992–1999.
Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre 1999 to 2006: beyond history of Australian science
By the late 1990s, it was clear that the ASAP Canberra Office would not attain financial independence, so its activities were carefully rolled back and ongoing projects subsumed into the work of the Melbourne Office. The Melbourne group also faced a key decision point: either to leave the University setting as a records-focused commercial entity, or continue to pursue the intellectual and cognitive challenges through grounded action research into contextual information utilisation.
The change was dramatic. Although still underpinned by an enduring commitment to the history and archives of Australian science – reflected in the new name, the Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre – the projects of the Centre were covering an increasing range of disciplines based on the generalisable digital and informatic skills of the now reduced staff. As part of the transition, McCarthy, as Director, took an academic appointment (Senior Research Fellow) and with that a commitment to the emerging discipline of social and cultural informatics, the major societal challenges of intergenerational knowledge-transfer and what was by then, the thorny issue of digital preservation. The steady rise in the percentage of journal articles (13%; see Figure ) continued, but by any analysis this would have been deemed low for an aspiring research centre. Although Austehc took on a teaching role with the second and third year Arts subject, ‘Fact, Fiction and Fraud in the Digital Age’, it was proving difficult to establish a standard faculty-based research centre without a discipline-driven stream of students through the undergraduate courses to Honours and higher degrees, let alone positions for post-doctoral Fellows. The University of Melbourne had transferred its library and archival science courses to another Melbourne institution decades earlier.
Figure 3. Publication types of the Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre 1999–2006.
The large number (52%) of archival guides might appear to counter the broadening of Austehc’s focus; however, most of this effort was in the creation of new standardised web editions of earlier archival guides. This was not a simple process of creating pdf versions of early print or html editions, but the creation of entirely new editions with enhanced data and descriptive capabilities. What was emerging was a digitally driven imperative to ensure that guides to archival collections and other web genres that support archival information infrastructure, did not become relics of early socio-technical constraints. Thus, the need to reduce technological dependencies, to eschew highly system-dependent web fashions, to continue to develop standards (both conceptual and informatic) and to keep bringing data forward, became the foundations of the Centre’s emerging research programme.
ESRC 2007 to 2013: finding a home in the University Library
In 2005, it became clear that the restructure of the Faculty of Arts, resulting from introducing the new University of Melbourne degree structure, created challenges for HPS and it ceased to exist as a department. This created a problem for Austehc as under the University’s statutes it needed to be attached to a department or school. A formal University review of Austehc was instigated by the Centre Director, with the explicit aim of assessing the value Austehc brought to the University through its work and the implicit goal of either finding a new place in the emerging structure or enabling its transfer to another University (or elsewhere). In late 2006, Linda O’Brien, the University of Melbourne Chief Information Officer and University Librarian, offered to bring Austehc into Information Services (effectively the University Library) with a significantly enhanced budget allocation, under the name the eScholarship Research Centre. The Global Financial Crisis hit shortly after and the University began almost immediately on a series of substantive budget cuts, which took the underlying support for the ESRC back to the ad hoc level it had been in the Faculty of Arts. However, the ESRC was able to draw on the well-established operating model of ASAP and Austehc and kept developing external projects and funding sources. The downside was that the ESRC was not able to drive the internal change agenda envisioned by O’Brien. Probably the clearest indicator of the focus on the external research consultancy projects to meet the potential budget shortfall, was the increase in client reports to 17% (see Figure ).
Figure 4. Publication types of the eScholarship Research Centre 2007–2013.
In 2010, under the direction of Philip Kent, the University Librarian, another formal review was undertaken to tease out what appeared to be an inherent logical conflict between the information infrastructure and research-oriented services offered by the ESRC and its role as a research centre with a clearly defined research programme and research outputs to match. The ESRC, as a research centre in the Library, was a structural anomaly within the University of Melbourne, but not without precedent overseas. The intrinsic value of the work of the ESRC was again acknowledged and the apparently conflicting entanglement between ‘research and service’ functions identified as a goal for resolution. However, no changes were recommended for structural re-alignment and the ESRC stayed within the Library as the only University research centre not in a Faculty. In 2013, the Director was promoted to Associate Professor, based on the University’s internal merit processes, thus fulfilling one of the recommendations of the review that the Director held a professorial-level appointment.
ESRC 2014 onwards: information infrastructure in the age of escalating information entropy
In 2015, under the direction of Teresa Chitty, Director of Research and Collections, the ESRC was again formally reviewed according to the requirements of the University of Melbourne Research Office and the University statutes. To facilitate the review, the ESRC produced a detailed report on the previous five years, including a statement of its activities based on the four functions of collaboration, engagement, research and scholarly services. The report of the review committee is available via the University’s institutional repository. The terms of reference were essentially the same as the previous review and the overall outcome similar. What was different was that the structure of the University had substantially changed around the ESRC. The Centre was now part of the reconfigured Research and Collections in Academic Services, notionally part of the ‘Library’, although it had ceased to exist as an administrative unit in the new structure.
Figure shows the continuing steady increase in the proportion of journal articles and other standard scholarly outputs, while not pulling away from the public knowledge web resources that characterised the work of the previous two decades. What is difficult to cover in retrospective analyses is the sense of the future and the discourse about that future that happens person-to-person, but struggles to find expression in publications. The twenty-first century has already become an era characterised by a need to manage the flow of information rather than information objects (records), which could be understood as a rapid escalation in information entropy. The imperatives that follow from this technology-driven change challenge both conventional archival and scholarly practices. However, what does not change are the principles and intent that underpin those practices.
Figure 5. Publication types of the eScholarship Research Centre 2014–2015.
Cycles and epicycles: organisational evolution 1985–2015
An alternative view of the period 1985–2015 can be seen by looking at the absolute numbers of projects, publications and staff registered each year (Figure ). A project register has been systematically maintained since the beginning of ASAP and the data are now managed in a special instance of the Online Heritage Resource Manager. The same system also registers all the publications and outputs of the organisations, the staff engaged and the relationships between them. Figure views this data in a linear fashion. The peaks in project registrations tend to coincide quite closely with the periods of organisational change outlined in the previous sections of the paper. It had become a general rule of thumb that our publication output trailed project registration and that can be seen clearly in Figure .
Figure 6. Number of projects, publications and staff registered in the ESRC projects register 1985–2015.
Staff numbers are tricky to analyse and the cycles less clear. The underlying data are also more problematic and are becoming more so as the range of forms of engagement diversifies. The ESRC now has operationally funded staff (academic and professional), research contract staff (academic and professional), casual staff, honorary research fellows, volunteers and practicum students.
Conclusion
The story of the ASAP–Austehc–ESRC succession from 1985 to 2015 is as remarkable as it is unusual. Its endurance and resilience can be seen, in hindsight, as stemming from a form of punctuated evolution, in the Darwinian sense, in a socio-technical environment. From the inside, and perhaps from the outside, tactical choices made day-to-day to keep things going tend to disguise the much deeper and now highly evolved strategic vision for the Centre and the role it sees itself playing for society. The emergent seven-year cycle of organisational change provided a structural fabric that helped mitigate ad hoc and reactive decision-making.
In 1997–1998, at the height of its influence and representing a maturity in its outlook, ASAP took on the organisation and running of an international archives conference, Working with Knowledge (http://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/asa/stama/conf/). If the ESRC organised a conference today, the title would be the same. Held in Canberra in May 1998 under the auspices of the science, technology and medicine special interest groups of the International Council on Archives and the Australian Society of Archivists, a key theme of the conference was the exploration of the practical and theoretical application of archives in the late twentieth century. Up to half of the then current staff presented on their practical experience of working for ASAP, alongside six international speakers and other local speakers. The conference set the scene for the future direction of the Centre, claiming confidently that although stemming ‘from a focus on the needs of science and technology’, our methodologies of working with knowledge had ‘ramifications for the entire information, archives and records industry – a key industry of the 21st Century’ (http://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/asa/stama/conf/WWKpage2.htm).
Although ASAP had only joined the international scene in 1995, it found immediately that it had much to contribute to the science archives community, with its epicentres in the United States and the United Kingdom. ASAP also found it had a natural affinity with the work of Daniel Pitti (later at the University of Virginia) in the development and testing of conceptual and informatic standards to support archival activities. Participation in the group that devised the Encoded Archival Context xml schema just before the turn of the millennium was a key factor in the decision to remain in the academic environment and contribute to a global research programme. It was this work that enabled Austehc to work closely with the National Library of Australia in the conceptualisation and then testing of the data transfer that underpins Trove.
Figure presents a detailed selection from a larger network graph visualisation of the data from the ESRC project register, illustrating the relationships between people, organisations, projects, conferences, grants and cultural artefacts. In this version of the visualisation the passage of time is seen moving from right to left with ASAP on the right, the ESRC on the left and Austehc (not labelled) in the middle. This visualisation was created using a web services tool (ConneX) created by the ESRC, the code for which is available through Bitbucket.
Figure 7. Detail from a network graph visualisation of the data from the ESRC project register.
Figure reveals some of the structural and functional connections that underpins the story of the ESRC and indicates how visual analytics, in a practical sense, reveal the emergence of ‘social and cultural informatics’ as an analytical tool tackling interconnected information. Network science, as applied to social and cultural relations, explicitly provides the intellectual backdrop for the Centre’s research agenda for the twenty-first century and has contributed to the new insights and tools the ESRC brings to its research and service-oriented collaborations. This is nowhere better seen than in McCarthy’s consulting for the International Atomic Energy Agency (2002–2007), where he developed a new conceptual approach to the immensely problematic issue of the long-term management of information about radioactive waste (Kenneally, Citation2014). This approach to sustainable information infrastructure and commitment to the intergenerational transfer of knowledge underpins all the Centre’s work, from the Encyclopedia of Australian Science (1994–) and the Australian Women’s Register (2000–), to the significant documentation of the landscape of child welfare history in Australia (Find and Connect, 2011–). We recognise that what communities need is continuous knowledge of (the existence of) their records and culture. This is what will continue to shape the research programme of the ESRC and the way it will help continue the transformation of the University of Melbourne Library to meet the information needs of the twenty-first century.
Notes on contributors
Gavan McCarthy is an associate professor of Social and Cultural Informatics and Director of the University of Melbourne eScholarship Research Centre. The Centre, established in 2007, draws on his expertise in archival science, a long-standing interest in the history of Australian science and contributes to information infrastructure development within the University. His career has been shaped through strong engagement with community and cross-disciplinary research projects in fields such as Indigenous studies, education, social work, linguistics, anthropology, population health and history.
Helen Morgan has worked at the ESRC (and its predecessors) since 1996. Her broad research focus is on the communication and sustainability of scholarly data in digital/networked environments and the transfer of knowledge between researchers, memory institutions and the community. 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.
Elizabeth Daniels is a project archivist at the ESRC. Before joining the ESRC, Elizabeth worked as a qualitative research assistant at a social research centre in Melbourne, focusing primarily on federal government policy, communications, programme development and evaluation and staff surveys. She has also done some archival work for several community groups as a volunteer.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
References
- Kenneally, C. (2014). The invisible history of the human race: How DNA and history shape our identities and our futures. Collingwood: Black Inc. Books.
- McCarthy, G. (1991). Guide to the archives of science in Australia: records of individuals. Port Melbourne: D.W. Thorpe in association with Australian Science Archives Project & National Centre for Australian Studies.