View the presentation slides  (2.7 Mb)

Abstract

Since its establishment in 2000 as a collaboration between the National Federation of Australian Women and the University of Melbourne, the Australian Women’s Archives Project (AWAP) has sought to encourage the preservation of women’s archival heritage and to make it more accessible to researchers via the Internet. Central to this mission has been the establishment and development of the AWAP Register, a specialist central access point to information about material held in Australian libraries and archives relating to women. Reliant on project funding to develop its content, the receipt of an ARC LIEF grant for 2008 is enabling AWAP to explore community based methods for populating the register, as well as enabling the harvesting of its content into services like People Australia.

This paper will explore the model of federated information architecture for sustainable humanities computing proposed for the AWAP Register. Such a model is aimed at creating and defining tools and services as components of information infrastructure to increase the productivity of all those associated with the creation, maintenance and use of source material for humanities research and to foster the development of complicit systems. It will incorporate appropriate data and metadata standards for description and exchange and provide a specification of their behaviour in the different kinds of services that make up the system. The paper will also explore the issues this raises for scholarly practices within the humanities and for maintaining this kind of digital and networked infrastructure.

About the speakers

Joanne Evans is a Research Fellow at the eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC) at the University of Melbourne. With qualifications and experience in information management, recordkeeping and archiving, and systems development, and having recently completed her PhD investigating recordkeeping metadata interoperability, she brings to the eResearch space a valuable combination of skills. In her research at the ESRC, she is keen to explore ways in which library and archives principles are applied into scholarly practices in order to meet the challenges of the digital and networked age. Joanne has also been involved with recordkeeping and resource discovery metadata standards development as part of working groups within Standards Australia’s IT 21/7 Committee and with the Australia Society of Archivist’s Committee on Descriptive Standards.

Nikki Henningham is a research fellow located in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne. She completed her PhD, a study of gender and race in Northern Australia during the colonial period, in the Department of History at the University of Melbourne in 2000. Since then, she has taught in a wide range of undergraduate subjects, including world history, film and history and Australian history, and has conducted research for a variety of projects, including the Australian Women’s Archives Project. She has research interests in the general area of Australian women’s history, with a particular focus on women and sport, women and oral history and the relationship between the keeping of archives and the construction of history. In 2005, she received the National Archives of Australia’s Ian Mclean Award for her work in this area. Nikki is the Project Officer for the Australian Research Council Linkage Project “Childhood Tradition and Change: a national study of the historical and contemporary practices and significance of Australian children’s playlore.” (visit www.australian.unimelb.edu.au/CTC/ index.html). She is also the Executive Officer for the Australian Women’s Archives Project (visit www.womenaustralia.info/) and is working with scholars from the University of Melbourne’s eScholarship Research Centre on an ARC funded project which seeks to conduct active research into technologies to support the data gathering and analysis activities of researchers in women’s studies.