This theme issue of the Australian Library Journal has the title The Library–Archive Confluence: The eScholarship Research Centre, University of Melbourne. I have long held the view that librarians have much to learn from archival theory and practice – a view that holds greater currency as both segments of the information profession strive to develop new ways of working to manage digital materials. Consequently, I am delighted that the nine articles in this issue explore archival practice as exemplified in the activities of the eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC) at the University of Melbourne. The ESRC is unusual in that it is a research centre embedded in a library and, as such, its activities will command the interest of the Journal’s primary readership.
At the heart of the ESRC’s practice, its director Gavan McCarthy notes in the first article, is a recognition that ‘what communities need is continuous knowledge of (the existence of) their records and culture’ and its practice is based on documentation, especially documentation of relationships. The power of this practice is amply demonstrated in the major projects described in articles about Australian women’s history, the institutional ‘care’ of children in the 20th century, Australian science and the repatriation of ancestral human remains to indigenous communities. The range of the ESRC’s interests and activities is by no means limited to these disparate fields, as other contributions to this issue make clear.
Gavan McCarthy, Helen Morgan and Elizabeth Daniels begin this issue with an overview of the history of the ESRC and its activities, appropriately subtitled ‘working with knowledge in the twenty-first century’. What started in 1985 as a national infrastructure project (the Australian Science Archives Project) is now a fully-fledged research programme in its own right, based in the discipline of social and cultural informatics, with strengths in archives and collaborating with colleagues with similar interests around the world. McCarthy, Morgan and Daniels’ overview is based on a bibliography of selected publications of the ESRC and its predecessors included at the end of this issue. In ‘Better together’, Teresa Chitty and Donna McRostie describe the role of the University of Melbourne Library in relation to the roles and services provided by the ESRC. They demonstrate how the ESRC provides value to the University and, indeed, to the Australian research sector.
The next four articles describe major projects of the ESRC. In ‘The Australian Women’s Register and the case of the missing apostrophe’, Nikki Henningham and Helen Morgan tell us about the genesis of the Register and its development into a fully online archival resource dedicated to the preservation and promotion of the history of Australian women. The Find & Connect website, documenting the records relating to the history of child welfare in Australia, is described by Cate O’Neill in ‘Forgotten Australians in the library’. O’Neill demonstrates the importance of records to Care Leavers to encourage libraries to improve the service they offer to this group. Ailie Smith and Gavan McCarthy note the Encyclopedia of Australian Science and how it has been documenting and preserving the history of Australian science, technology, engineering and medicine since 1985. They consider the ‘virtual meeting or confluence of the library and the archive’ in the Encylopedia to be a major achievement which ‘flags a future in an ever-increasing data-dependent world’. Paul Turnbull, in ‘Managing and mapping the history of collecting indigenous human remains’, describes the role of the ESRC in contributing informatics expertise to the Return, Reconcile, Renew project as it seeks to extend community awareness and understanding of the repatriation of indigenous ancestral human remains.
Two articles describe some of the principles on which the ESRC’s work is based. In ‘Documenting things: bringing archival thinking to interdisciplinary collaborations’, Michael Jones emphasises the importance of documentation and archival thinking to the ESRC’s endeavours, illustrating this with examples from organisations as dissimilar as the Victorian Government’s Department of Primary Industries, The Australian Ballet and Museum Victoria. In ‘Pathways, parallels and pitfalls: the Scholarly Web, the ESRC and Linked Open Data’, Antonina Lewis and Peter Neish examine two of the ESRC’s key principles: ‘relationship-centric contextualisation of information resources’ and the production of sustainable, standards-based data outputs for seamless exchange among machines. They indicate how these principles have positioned the ESRC effectively for participation in the Linked Open Data community.
While some of the concerns in these articles are well outside the normal range of those we would expect to find in a library setting, they demonstrate how the ESRC can, in that setting, participate in significant cross-sectoral research collaboration. Not only can it participate in it, but also it can develop and lead it.
The Journal’s editorial assistants, Jaye Weatherburn, Caitlin Stone and Julia Kuehns, have assisted in the preparation of this issue. Special thanks are due to Jaye Weatherburn for suggesting the theme for this issue and for assisting in its initial development. Because there are more articles in this theme issue than usual, it carries no reviews. Reviews will again be included in the Journal’s final special issue (November 2016), which will be devoted to the education of information professionals – a subject that must be constantly re-examined and renewed if it is to remain relevant.
At the end of this year, the Journal will cease publication under its current title. ALIA’s Board of Directors has decided, following an investigation of the Association’s journal publishing activities, that, from 1 January 2017, the Australian Library Journal will have the title Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association and that Australian Academic and Research Libraries will cease publication. The announcement of this decision is available at https://www.alia.org.au/news/14122/journal-consultation-update.
AALIA, FLIANZA