The Encyclopedia of Australian Science: a virtual meeting of archives and libraries^*

Abstract

The story of the Encyclopedia of Australian Science is fundamental to the story of the eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC) and its predecessors. Published online in 2010, there are data in this public knowledge web resource that can be traced back to the early days of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, and earlier to the beginnings of the Australian Science Archives Project (ASAP) in March 1985. ASAP was created to help meet the needs of the history of Australian science research community by locating, documenting and finding an archival home for collections of records and creating a register of where collections relating to the history of science were held in Australia. This paper provides a perspective on the events that led to the web publication of the Encyclopedia of Australian Science in 2010 and its continuing role as a key activity of the ESRC. There is a focus on the reasons why this work was required in the first instance and the lessons learned along the way. The paper reflects on the initial drivers that continue to challenge, indeed frustrate, the development of cohesive national information infrastructure to support research and societal self-awareness, despite the developments in digital and communications technologies.

Keywords:

• History of Australian science
• archives of Australian science
• social and cultural informatics
• archival science
• information infrastructure
• research data
• digital preservation

Introduction

The eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC, 2007–present) and its predecessor organisations, the Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre (Austehc, 1999–2006) and the Australian Science Archives Project (ASAP, 1985–1999), have been helping to document and preserve the history of Australian science, technology, engineering and medicine for over 30 years. Throughout this time a few recurring challenges have persisted, which the Centre continues to tackle. These include reluctance on the part of scientists to value their own legacy, a generally poor understanding by scientists of historical practice and, as a result, fragmentary and variable engagement with the world of archives. It is within this context that work commenced in March 1985, leading eventually to the web publication of the Encyclopedia of Australian Science in 2010.

In an article written for Australasian Science in late 2002, Gavan McCarthy noted with a sense of frustration the hurdles encountered by academic historians of science, ‘because scientists were not aware of themselves as culturally important actors and therefore did not initiate the archival process’ (McCarthy, 2002). Ann Mozley (later Moyal) likewise had observed in 1966 that the importance of understanding our scientific heritage was just beginning to be realised and that it was important to collect and curate the primary documents of these activities (Mozley, 1966, pp. vii, viii). She also identified the important role that librarians play in preserving the history of science in Australia, noting that prior to specific efforts to identify and preserve the archives and manuscript collections of science, the ‘prevision of librarians’ had meant that archives already existed in collections across Australia.

Memory institutions, such as the National Library of Australia (NLA) and the Australian Academy of Science’s Basser Library, have at different times and in different ways played significant roles in preserving and publicising knowledge of the history of Australian science (Fenner, 2005). At various times both institutions have collaborated with ASAP, Austehc and the ESRC, collectively and individually, to find innovative uses of emerging technologies, including the development, testing and implementation of new social and cultural informatic standards to support the use of the web for scholarly purposes (Dewhurst, 2008). This work has led to the connecting of information about archival collections and published materials managed by libraries in web-based public knowledge resources, which transcended institutional and discipline boundaries, within the broader concept of a distributed but networked information infrastructure.

More recently, the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) has encouraged scientists and other researchers to think about the preservation, sharing and reuse of research data (Houghton & Gruen, 2014). To meet this goal, it is noted that the context in which this research data are created, curated and understood is critical, echoing the argument heralded by Moyal some 30 years earlier that without the context supplied by archives, scientific publications are an insufficient form of evidence for historians (Mozley, 1966, p. vii). Scientific research does not exist in isolation, but rather continues to build on, and learn from work that has been undertaken in the past. Understanding this historical perspective can be invaluable in supporting current work and preparing for the future. In addition, archives and manuscript collections of Australian scientists and scientific institutions often include data or research that could be reused by contemporary scientists, or assist them in analysing work that has come before. In Australia, the imperative to contextualise science, by ensuring that relevant archival materials were preserved, emerged in the second half of the twentieth century under the leadership of Ann Moyal and Rod Home. The establishment of the Australian Science Archives Project on 4 March 1985 by Professor Rod Home in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science was a landmark event in this story (McCarthy & Evans, 2007).

This paper focusses on the circumstances that led to the eScholarship Research Centre publishing the Encyclopedia of Australian Science (EOAS, http://www.eoas.info) as a web-based public knowledge resource in 2010. It concentrates on the conditions that led to its beginnings some 25 years earlier, the local, national and transnational information infrastructure to which it seeks to contribute, and notes the persistent positivist inclinations of scientists that still drive them to place little value on history and archives.

Scientists, historians, archivists and librarians

I didn’t comment at your seminar on Thursday because I was overcome by the inadequacy of the data that you have to deal with in history. (Fenner, 1984, p. 1)

In April 1984, Professor Frank Fenner (1914–2010), an eminent Australian microbiologist, attended a seminar at the Australian National University given by the anthropologist and historian, Diane Barwick (1938–1986). She was exploring the role that may have been played by smallpox on the health of Indigenous communities during the initial European colonisation of Australia. This sentence opened his two-page letter to Barwick shortly after the seminar and captured a rare appreciation from the sciences of the challenges of historical research and its total reliance on the fragmentary records of past activities (Fenner, 1984).

The role of archives, understood both as preserved records and the institutions, is implied although not explicitly tackled in this letter. By making reference to the ‘inadequacy of the data’, Fenner is also pointing to the less well-understood entanglement of data and records. For the sciences, data should be explicit, meaningful and well-structured and lend itself to analysis. As a rule, scientific researchers create laboratory situations or field environments where they can control sufficient variables so that the resultant data can be confidently assessed. Historians, on the other hand, rely on testimony and incidental documents created during the course of everyday activities, in which there may be embedded data of value for analysis. Both historians and scientists share a common goal, which is to help us understand the world into which we are born. Historians examine the progression of human (and other) actions through time, whereas scientists tend to focus on the nature of the things that comprise our world.

Fenner also had a deep understanding of the relationship between science and the history of science and, by implication, the archives of science. Elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in the first election in 1954, Fenner took on the mantle of Academy historian, leading the compilation of a series of histories of the Academy, commencing with a 25- year history published in 1980 (Fenner, 1995, 2005; Fenner & Rees, 1980). Fenner understood the need to not only preserve records, but also to publish historical accounts. His monumental edited history of microbiology in Australia (Fenner, 1990) is a seminal work and the discipline would be much the poorer for its absence.

The historians of science had recognised the challenges that their discipline faced and had filled leadership roles that scientists were hesitant to acknowledge. It seemed that the scientists assumed the infrastructure that ensured the preservation of knowledge was well established and funded by others. This appears to be the understanding of the Australian Nobel Laureate, Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet (1899–1985). When asked on 6 March 1985 by the senior archivist of the Australian Science Archives Project about the plans he may have made for his records, his reply was that he was waiting for someone to approach him. Burnet died on 31 August 1985, but plans were well in hand to ensure that his legacy would be accessible for future study and the resultant collection, processed by ASAP, was donated to the University of Melbourne Archives on 31 July 1991 (McCarthy, Manhal, O’Sullivan, Tropea, & Sherratt, 2001).

Another scientist with a considerable awareness of the importance of archives was physicist and Antarctic explorer, Phillip Law (1912–2010). Unlike Fenner, who worked in isolation from the library and archival professions, and Burnet who had waited to be approached, Law sought out the Australian Science Archives Project in 1988 to work with him on his records. The relationship between ASAP and the Law collection persists to this day with the eScholarship Research Centre honouring its obligations to ensure his legacy is maintained. This project has been through a number of phases, as the collection was progressively handed over to the custody of the National Library of Australia (Percival, Zilio, & Morgan, 2000). Law remained active well into his 90s and consciously managed and built on his archive until his death in 2010.

The successful efforts by ASAP and its successors to help preserve archives of Australian scientists and to share information about these collections is evident in the Encylopedia of Australian Science, but there are also rarely documented stories of records that have been actively destroyed or lost due to benign neglect. Scientists seldom publish articles on failed experiments and archivists are reluctant to embarrass individuals and organisations that deliberately destroy valuable records or allow them to quietly disappear. This has an impact on the productivity of historical research which is as much determined by knowledge of what has been destroyed as by what has been preserved. Sadly, much of the knowledge of what has been lost is purely anecdotal. A notable case was the loss of the correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller, Victorian Government Botanist. A prolific letter writer, this archive of ‘tens of thousands of letters’ (McCarthy & Evans, 2007) was distributed, lost and rumoured to have been destroyed in the decades after his death (Home, Lucas, Maroske, Sinkora, & Voigt, 1998). A project to recover some of the lost correspondence of von Mueller has been undertaken since 1987 by mining archives, herbaria and museums across the world for copies of von Mueller’s outgoing correspondence that were sent to his scientific colleagues (McCarthy & Evans, 2007). While these efforts could not reassemble the complete set of original records that was destroyed, this work did salvage a significant number of letters penned by von Mueller during his highly active and long career. This resulted in the publication of three printed volumes of the edited correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller (Home et al., 1998) and the assembly of a vast digital archive of transcribed correspondence.

Beginnings of the scholarly web

It is against this backdrop that the Encyclopedia of Australian Science, first published online in 2010, can be understood. It provides a direct line of continuity for the Centre’s earliest public knowledge web resource, Bright Sparcs, first published online in 1994. Its heritage reaches back even further to the Australian Science Archive Project’s early days, capturing data about the distribution of the archives of science across Australia and publishing edited versions of these data in print and online. ASAP was noted as an early conscious example of a national documentation strategy, that is a programme ‘focussing attention on under-represented areas of collection and cross institutional cooperation’ (Reed, 2003).

In 1985, ASAP commenced documenting the location and content of archive and manuscript collections in Australia relating to science, technology and medicine. Repositories where this material was sourced included archives, libraries, museums, scientific organisations and private collections. These efforts built on work that was begun in the 1960s by Ann Mozley, who published A Guide to the Manuscript Records of Australian Science in 1966 (Mozley, 1966). ASAP established a paper-based filing system but added to this, in 1987, a relational database focussing on the essential identity and location metadata for collections. This work in registering, updating and adding to the knowledge of archives of science in Australia culminated in 1991 in the publication of a print book: Guide to the Archives of Science in Australia: Records of Individuals (McCarthy, 1991).

Bright Sparcs

Using the technologies available at the time became a theme of ASAP. Without the overhead of maintaining a records repository and the associated legacy obligations, it was possible to test new technologies, and the improved affordability of personal computers in the mid-1980s provided such an opportunity. The data for the print publication, Guide to the Archives of Science in Australia: Records of Individuals, was managed in a PC relational database and reprogrammed as an MARC-compliant electronic resource through two public networks (McCarthy & Evans, 2007). The initial focus of the information collected was people, collections and repositories and the network of links between them.

In 1993 a project, again in response to changes in technology, commenced to redevelop the register into a resource to be known as Bright Sparcs. This was to involve moving to a new database platform, editing and expanding on existing data and including extra features such as a gallery of images. It was envisaged that the resulting resource would be disseminated as a CD-ROM (Home & McCarthy, 1993). However, the project coincided with the rise of the World Wide Web in the 1990s and Bright Sparcs was launched as a web resource in 1994. This resource explored Australian scientists, their archives and an increasing bibliography of published resources relating to the history of Australian science.

The Australian Science Archives Project, under the direction of Tim Sherratt, had a Canberra office which operated from 1993 to 1998. The office was based at the Australian Academy of Science, co-located with the Academy’s Basser Library, linking two groups that were actively participating in the preservation and dissemination of Australia’s scientific heritage. Much of the work on Bright Sparcs was carried out by the ASAP Canberra office. After the closure of the ASAP Canberra office, Rosanne Walker – also the Australian Academy of Science’s librarian – continued in the role as content manager for Bright Sparcs until 2003.

While mapping knowledge about people, their records and the relevant repositories holding the collections was important, it became clear that without the inclusion of related published materials, a significant piece of the information infrastructure puzzle was missing. Starting in 1981, an annual ‘Bibliography of the History of Australian Science’ had been compiled and published by the Australian Academy of Science in Historical Records of Australian Science (Carlson, 1981). This followed the lead set in the northern hemisphere where the annual Isis bibliography of the history of science was first published in the journal Isis in 1913 (Sarton, 1913). Adding the ability to capture bibliographic information about history of science publications – that is publications about the scientists, rather than publications by them – would considerably improve the capacity to further document the networks of relationships between scientists, as revealed through historical analysis.

Originally, bibliographic data were added to Bright Sparcs after the compilation and publication of annual bibliographies. However, in the late 1990s, the bibliographic functionality in Bright Sparcs began to be used to capture the data for the ‘Bibliography of the History of Australian Science’ each year. This allowed for the simultaneous publication of the print bibliography and the incorporation of the updated references into the broader information infrastructure hosted by Bright Sparcs. This relationship continues to this day with the database backend that supports the Encyclopedia of Australian Science being used to capture the data for the annual bibliography.

Australian science at work

In 2000, a companion to Bright Sparcs was published online. This resulted from the receipt of funding from the Australian Research Council by the Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre, the successor to the Australian Science Archives Project. This register, named Australian Science at Work, documented the organisations and industries involved in Australia’s scientific past. Ideally, this information would have been added to the existing Bright Sparcs resource; however, as discussed by McCarthy and Evans (2007), due to ‘various reasons of project funding, deadlines and the complexity of the next level of system development involved’, it was not feasible to incorporate the additional data into Bright Sparcs at that time. The separate resource was developed in parallel with Bright Sparcs. What this approach lacked was the ability to link scientists to their educational institutions, their places of work and their affiliated professional associations. Thus, the implicit networks of scientists brought together through their associations and relationships could not be made explicit. The vision of the study of the connected world of Australian science using the emerging network analysis tools was both tantalisingly close, yet unattainable.

Bright Sparcs and Australian Science at Work continued to expand in parallel for the next 10 years. The two resources shared bibliographic and primary-source resource reference in their back-end databases, but the two web resources existed in isolation from each other. During this period, the vision of an interactive evidence-based information service revealing networks of people and organisations was starting to be realised in other projects such as the Australian Women’s Archive Project and their web resource, The Australian Women’s Register (http://www.womenaustralia.info/).

Austehc, like ASAP, had been administratively located within the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Arts. At the beginning of 2007, the Centre became part of the University Library and was renamed the eScholarship Research Centre. While this administrative relocation and name change shifted the primary focus of the Centre away from the history of Australian science, it did position the Centre alongside other information professionals within the Library. The Centre was seen as a source of social and cultural informatics expertise and systems applicable to a wider range of subject areas. Although diversified, the history of Australian science remained a key area of interest for the Centre.

Technological challenges and the Encyclopedia of Australian Science

By 2010, many of the barriers that had originally prevented Bright Sparcs and Australian Science at Work from being a single resource had been overcome and it was viable to incorporate the two resources and begin to map the personal, academic, professional and historical networks that existed between the people, organisations and other types of entities. The Encyclopedia of Australian Science was born, incorporating the data from the two existing resources. Persistence is an important factor in the resources created by the ESRC and its predecessors, so systems were set up to enable the links to the original Bright Sparcs and Australian Science at Work web pages to be redirected to the equivalent page in the Encyclopedia of Australian Science.

The rise in the use of information technology has produced a range of risks to both paper and born-digital records of science in Australia and this has framed the story of the Encyclopedia. In the mid-1990s, electronic communication and documentation methods were beginning to replace the use of paper filing systems and hard copy correspondence (McCarthy & Sherratt, 1996). With few exceptions, the work of ASAP and its successors do not provide evidence of scientists systematically managing email, digital correspondence, documents and data as records. Digital technologies seemed to have obfuscated the practicalities of how to achieve that goal, and the concept of intergenerational transfer of knowledge through long-lived systems does not appear to be a fundamental design consideration of contemporary digital developers and vendors. Despite the technological developments in the intervening years, in 2015 Michael Moss and others detailed some of the risks and challenges associated with digital recordkeeping that continue to impact on the long-term curation, preservation and dissemination of knowledge (Moss, Endicott-Popovsky, & Dupuis, 2015). These challenges include making records in non-analogue formats discoverable, the use of technology-dependent formats and how to manage sensitive or private digital records.

McCarthy and Sherratt (1996) identified that by intervening closer to the point at which records are created, rather than waiting for end-of-career or end-of-life moments to consider the transition to the archive and by looking at the value that the scientists themselves place on the records, strategies can be developed to help prevent the loss of valuable digital material. Where value is placed solely on the published outputs of studies and the cleaned up data contained in them, there is potential to overlook the research data and related records that sit behind. These data establishing the validity of findings are evidence of what actually happened in the scientific processes, and establish the information fabric that supports the reproducibility of findings. While paper is inherently stable and persistent, digital materials are inherently fragile and dependent on highly localised implicit and tacit knowledge (Vines, Hall, & McCarthy, 2011). These issues are relevant to the question of scientific fraud, which remains a constant challenge (Freckelton, 2016).

The von Mueller correspondence project offers a telling example of this digital fragility. The years of field research, locating the lost letters and obtaining copies, were followed by decades of intensive and painstaking scholarly editing. Naturally, over such a period, the digital file formats changed as technology moved forward. However, in 2011, it was discovered that the formats of a small but significant number of the documents were obsolete and could not be opened on more modern machines. A second salvage operation was required to remedy one of the unintended consequences of continuous digital innovation. Although programmatic means were used to transform most of the documents, several hundred had to be re-coded by hand. A secondary transformation to a standardised Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) XML format was undertaken to optimise the preservation and potential for future re-use of the embedded content of the digital documents and to reduce the chances of the collected correspondence of von Mueller being lost once again (McCarthy, 2015).

An intergenerational knowledge transfer challenge created by the increased dependency on digital resources is the issue behind web rot or the random breaking of links. This has become a major challenge for all those keen to build what Van de Sompel and Nelson called ‘the scholarly web’ (Van de Sompel & Nelson, 2015). This issue has plagued the Encyclopedia of Australian Science and its previous incarnations throughout their history. The transient nature of online content is a constant challenge for anyone wishing to cite resources found on the web. Added to this challenge are resources which do not have citable URLs for individual pages or sections, so that you cannot directly pinpoint the pages that were viewed. EOAS has been developed to not only provide information in its own right, but also to act as a gateway to a wealth of other resources that are available elsewhere, including both print and digital resources. As a project without recurrent funding, there are limitations on the resources available to ensure that information and links are kept up-to-date. This is mitigated through the use of detailed citations which would give users a reasonable chance of locating the resource using one of the web search engines.

An important development in the history of EOAS was the harvesting of the EOAS data by the National Library of Australia’s Trove service (http://trove.nla.gov.au). Bright Sparcs had been identified as a significant resource, documenting biographical information by the National Library of Australia’s People Australia project, which later became Trove (Dewhurst, 2008). After the NLA’s investigation into the most suitable standard for harvesting metadata about people and organisations into the new service they were developing, it was decided that the Encoded Archival Context (EAC) XML schema was the most suitable (Dewhurst, 2008). The Bright Sparcs data – by this time integrated with Australian Science at Work – was one of the first resources to be harvested into Trove in 2010 (McCarthy, Smith, & Jones, 2015). This meant that the EOAS data were now able to be connected more broadly to other resources at a national level, moving beyond the history of science field to become part of national information infrastructure.

Collaboration at risk: the Basser Library

In 2012, as recipient of the Australian Academy of Science’s Moran Award for History of Science Research, Ailie Smith visited the Basser Library with the aim of improving the metadata descriptions of the Basser’s manuscript collections (known as the Fenner Archives) in the Encyclopedia of Australian Science (Smith, 2012). The Basser Library holds more than 230 manuscript collections. Many collections are personal papers donated by Fellows of the Academy, while others relate to prominent scientific societies, publications or the Academy itself.

Ann Mozley, in her introduction to A Guide to the Manuscript Records of Australian Science, discusses the 1962 establishment of the Basser Library, shortly after the establishment of the Academy itself. The Basser was:

designed as a centre to draw together the published sources of this country’s science; to locate and collect the manuscript papers of her scientists and their institutions; and to promote and encourage the study of the history of scientific development and its cultural influence in Australia. (Mozley, 1966)

The manuscript collections at the Basser Library continued to grow and later included several collections that had been located and documented by the ASAP, including the records of Armin Aleksander Öpik, Andrew Crowther Hurley, Ernest William Titterton, Sir Ian William Wark and Ronald Gordon Giovanelli. Frank Fenner’s papers were deposited with the Basser and a collection of Ann Moyal’s research papers relating to women in science was also added.

In the 1990s, knowledge of the manuscript collections held by the Basser Library made its way into Australia’s national information infrastructure by their inclusion in the Register of Australian Archives and Manuscripts (RAAM), which was published online by the National Library of Australia. The Academy’s manuscript collections could then be discovered alongside other collections of archives and manuscripts in Australian libraries and archives. The RAAM data were later incorporated into the NLA’s Trove service, where the entries relating to the Basser collections can still be found.

Over time, the documentation in the Encyclopedia of Australian Science of the Basser collections had become sufficiently out-dated, justifying the 2012 project aimed to ensure the collection information was accurate. Details of the manuscript collections held by the Academy had been maintained and disseminated by static HTML pages on the Academy’s website. A main web page listed all of the collections and featured links to pages with more detailed listings for each collection. The URLs for these detailed listings were citable but, as a rule, they did not contain links to related resources published elsewhere such as the Encyclopedia of Australian Science. However, as these data were now also published in EAOS, which was harvested by Trove, they could be incorporated into the broader context or network of information and resources about the history of Australian science and more broadly with other resources and collections at a national level. This was useful evidence of the value of multi-institutional collaboration and the archive–library confluence.

In the Australian Academy of Science Newsletter 98, the Academy announced that new library catalogue software had been implemented and provided a link to the new online, searchable catalogue (From the Dome: New library catalogue, 2014). The existing manuscript listings were removed from the Academy’s website and the descriptions of the manuscript collections were moved to the new catalogue where they could be discovered alongside the Academy’s collection of published material. No redirects were in place from the previous HTML pages to the new records in the catalogue. However, shortly after in mid-2015, it was announced that the library and archives had closed and that a taskforce had been appointed to consider their future (Taskforce to consider future of library’s holdings, 2015). At the time of writing this paper in early 2016, all of the links to listings of the Basser Library’s manuscript collections from the Encyclopedia of Australian Science remain broken. Sadly, this was evidence of how quickly the benefits of multi-institutional collaboration could be undone through the poorly considered reversion to twentieth century library practice.

The future?

Despite the best efforts of some librarians, archivists, historians and scientists to preserve knowledge of Australia’s scientific heritage, there are still inherent vulnerabilities to both the physical and digital resources that have been collected or created in the 50 years since Ann Mozley published A Guide to the Manuscript Records of Australian Science. Manuscript collections are at risk from resource limitations, the shifting priorities of organisations, and limitations on physical and digital space to store material. They are also at risk of being lost in the depths of repositories, as the quantity of material always outweighs the resources available to catalogue it. Digital material is at risk from policies or procedures based on paper, rather than digital, paradigms, the rapid pace of technological development and change, and the relative ease with which online content can be moved – or removed – leaving broken links and gaps in knowledge.

By harnessing the informatic power of resources such as The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Trove to act as gateways to knowledge resources, bridge gaps between related material and increase the exposure and discoverability of resources, siloes of individual resources can be incorporated into a broader network of information infrastructure. However, these resources require ongoing maintenance and development and are still vulnerable to the challenges of technological change, resourcing limitations and the policy decisions that lack a long-term outlook.

Academic and research institutions are grappling with the challenges of how to manage and preserve research data, with funding bodies such as the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Australian Research Council actively encouraging making data from projects they fund publicly available. The ESRC has collaborated with other areas of the University Library on several projects funded by the ANDS, working on documenting research datasets within the University of Melbourne. All of these projects have demonstrated the need to integrate archival, library and data resources in a meaningful and persistent information fabric – a scholarly web. The virtual meeting or confluence of the library and the archive in the Encylopedia of Australian Science was a major achievement and still flags a future in an ever-increasing data-dependent world.

But perhaps Frank Fenner deserves the last word. He finished his letter to Diane Barwick with the following statement:

I would hate to be a historian trying to find the truth amongst so much garbage – with no certainty that you will ever be able to reach other than a tentative guess as to what happened. (Fenner, 1984)

While Fenner was referring to random processes surrounding the creation and preservation of records from the Australian frontier in the era of European incursion into Aboriginal land, he could just as easily be speaking to the historians of the future looking back at this time and place.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Ailie Smith is a senior research archivist at the University of Melbourne’s eScholarship Research Centre. Her work includes managing projects, the publication and management of a range of web resources, collaborating with organisations and researchers on projects with a social and cultural informatics focus and contributing to the development of tools for capturing information for the documentation of archival collections, and contextual information. In 2013, Ailie graduated Master of Business Information Systems from Monash University.

Gavan McCarthy is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Informatics and Director of the University of Melbourne’s 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.

Notes

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