Plastic-focused collection surveys are a fundamental starting point for locating, identifying and assessing the conservation needs of polymer-based objects, and are increasingly conducted internationally. As surveys are both time- and people-intensive, it is critical to ensure the optimal usefulness of the data for the institution and wider conservation community through consistent documentation, using flexible robust data structures, and making results accessible. However, only summaries of survey results have been published in the conservation literature, resulting in a lack of continuity and information dissemination. This is problematic for institutions without the necessary resources to conduct extensive surveys and to identify polymer types. This paper outlines the collaborative development of a plastic-focused collection survey methodology, highlighting the importance of developing and testing standardised procedures, engaging with expert collaborators, and ensuring results are accessible.

This chapter outlines the contributions of the University of Melbourne's eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC) to the Australian Research Council Linkage Project: Return, Reconcile, Renew (LP130100131). They were tasked with building a digital knowledge base that would assist communities engaged in repatriation efforts and provide information related to matters of cultural and historical significance to the general public. Through the use of archival informatics, the ESRC mapped the entangled historical and contemporary contexts of the removal and repatriation of Ancestral Remains. This chapter describes the essential archival categories – the key resources, core entities (people, organisations, etc.), and the multifarious relations between them – that were identified for the purposes of mapping this history, as well as the collaborative research processes that were employed in order to identify them. Through collaborative action research methodologies, the ESRC sought to consolidate the contextual information into a networked digital archive in a way that subverts colonial archival practices, many of which are still deeply embedded in contemporary archival practice.

This paper presents a case study that demonstrates how a long term research activity, with the intention to create a scholarly edition of scientific correspondence, can be liberated from its print paradigm strictures to join the twenty first century world of interconnected knowledge. The Von Mueller Correspondence Project has produced a corpus of over 15,600 digitally transcribed letters and related materials focused on the period 1840 to 1896. These are complemented by materials in a range of forms that refer to Mueller dating from 1814 to 1931. Mueller was a prolific correspondent and established links with hundreds of fellow botanists and biologists across the globe; most of these, and certainly the most notable, will be registered in the History of Science Society Isis Cumulative Bibliography as Authority Records with links to publications about them and is some cases publications by them. The long-term plan is to systemically interlink the Von Mueller Correspondence Project digital corpus and the Isis Cumulative Bibliography and develop the synergies that will drive digital humanities analysis and future scholarly endeavour. That is the vision but what is the reality? At what stage is the project now? How did it get this far? What steps remain? How does the story of this project help us better understand the imperatives of digital scholarship – its strengths and its challenges?

Alec Costin is one of Australia's foremost ecologists, internationally respected for his pioneering work into the soils, hydrology and vegetation of the Australian alpine regions. Advisor to governments and their agencies, he was instrumental in the conservation of the Australian Alps. Alec's field notes, data sheets and Kodachrome slides, a record of the Alps in the 1950s and 60s, are important historically and provide an important resource to interpret change in vegetation and landscapes in the Australian Alps. The University of Melbourne, funded by the Australian Alps National Parks, will catalogue and archive these materials, so future generations of scientists and historians can easily gain access to them.

SUMMARY This article examines the evolution of a national register of the archives of science and technology in Australia and the related development of an archival informatics focused initially on people and their relationships to archival materials. The register was created in 1985 as an in-house tool for the Australian Science Archives Project of the University of Melbourne. Its potential as a public reference guide for historians of science and technology soon became apparent. The story of the computerisation and publication of the register provides the background for the examination of the use of archival authority records as a means of finding better ways of connecting archives with their potential users. The success of this approach led to demands from the community for a generic database tool using a framework based on the authoritative entities associated with archival materials-an activity that we started to call contextual information management. The Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM) was created in response to these calls, and the story of its development as a tool for mapping networks of contextual information is told in the latter part of the article.

The eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC) at University of Melbourne has linked its archival services with AARNet’s storage service “CloudStor” by using the Filesender API. As the digital transformation of research expands so too do the research support and collection services evolve through integration with national research infrastructure. Rather than attempting to provide access to privacy and rights-compromised materials online, the ESRC are working to deliver these types of unpublishable materials directly to the researcher under explicitly articulated conditions. The service is designed to allow archival collection materials to be delivered via request by an online form to researchers anywhere in the world. A policy framework (where the user supplies information and agrees to the conditions by click-through) combined with the file sending and notification functions in CloudStor support utility and efficacy interests of the ESRC and the research community. A researcher searching the web (the ESRC finding aids and item descriptions are indexed by search engines), will locate the archival item they want (that has defined conditions of use), click the link which takes them to the online form to complete, and click deliver. The process called the Digital Archives Delivery Service (DADS) is envisaged as an extensible web service and operates as follows. The researcher’s request conveys to DADS the key metadata describing the materials, the associated obligations and the location of the material for transfer. In response to the request the DADS then batches and loads the files into CloudStor. A notification is sent through the Filesender function in CloudStor to the researcher that reiterates the obligations associated with having a copy of the materials. The researcher, if happy to comply with those obligations, can then download the files. The request for the supply of archives process happens in a matter of seconds through lightweight technical integration and because CloudStor operates on the national high speed network provided by AARNet that meets the needs of research and education. The transaction is documented both as records (emails) and data and is provided to the archive enabling both accountability and continuous reporting. The DADS source code, and documentation is located on GitHub (https://github.com/esrc-unimelb/DADS) for those interested in what happens technically through the use of the Filesender API, e.g. get/send commands. The ESRC have completed the first two cycles of proof-of-concept with DADS and the capacity to report on the implementation phase is anticipated by 2018. This presentation will cover the journey of implementing DADS, from ideation, working with the different perspectives in a multi-disciplinary environment, to creating a minimum viable product (MVP). The benefits of working in an agile manner, and developing a MVP, as opposed to a ‘perfect product’ in the academic environment will also be discussed.

In 2015-16 researchers from the University of Melbourne and Museums Victoria undertook a collaborative project which sought to visualise archival data from the museum as a means to investigate the structure and context of the Dorothy Howard Collection. This article introduces Dorothy Howard's work, which is part of the internationally significant Australian Children's Folklore Collection, and looks at the project's processes and outcomes, including the initial visualisations produced. In doing so, the authors highlight the data-intensive nature of such work, suggest the potential of visualisations to reveal collection structures, and outline possibilities for future projects and collaborations.

R.W. Home was appointed the first and, up to 2016, the only Professor of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) at the University of Melbourne. A pioneering researcher in the history of Australian science, Rod believes in both the importance and universality of scientific knowledge, which has led him to focus on the international dimensions of Australian science, and on a widespread dissemination of its history. This background has shaped five major projects Rod has overseen or fostered: the Australasian Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (a monograph series), Historical Records of Australian Science (a journal), the Australian Science Archives Project (now a cultural informatics research centre), the Australian Encyclopedia of Science (a web resource), and the Correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller Project (an archive, series of publications and a forthcoming web resource). In this review, we outline the development of these projects (all still active), and reflect on their success in collecting, producing and communicating the history of science in Australia.

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.

This select bibliography includes guides (160), newsletters (18), journal articles (58) and books/book chapters (11) written, edited and/or published by the Australian Science Archives Project, Austehc or the ESRC from 1985 to the end of 2015. This compilation does not include web resources (47), conference papers (97), client reports (89), software (4), physical exhibitions (2) and a number of recorded interviews. Details of these publications can be found in a full bibliography available from the ESRC. Abbreviations used: ASAP (Australian Science Archives Project); ESRC (eScholarship Research Centre); Austehc (Australian Science and Technology History Centre).

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.

Managing the personal information and possessions of young people in out of home care presents unique challenges. Photos, documents and mementos are easily lost or left behind at changes of care placement. Lack of access to such personal artefacts negatively impacts care decisions, identity construction and social relationships. Prior work identified the potential for an online repository (a 'virtual locker') to manage personal materials in this context. This research examines tensions related to privacy and control that impact on the design of the virtual locker. Through workshops conducted with young care leavers and social workers we derived design objectives and, based on these, we propose mechanisms for resolving the tensions identified. Informed by user evaluation of a 'virtual locker' prototype, we develop heuristics for design of personal content systems in shifting social contexts. In this work, we identify the need for personal control of content, balanced governance and flexible collaboration tools. These heuristics and associated insights contribute to theoretical and design work related to personal and social content systems.

This paper explores the role of archival activism in supporting social movements linked to human rights and social justice agendas. Taking a records continuum perspective, it presents an Australian case study relating to the Stolen Generations, Former Child Migrants, Forgotten Australians and Forced Adoption communities to illustrate imperatives for advocacy and activism in support of the “archival autonomy” of communities. Framed by critical theory, the study identifies and analyses systemic problems in meeting the recordkeeping and archival identity, memory, accountability, redress and recovery needs of these key communities. The devastating impact of both finding and not finding relevant information is highlighted, along with how systemic and structural difficulties in seeking access to vital evidence can be re-traumatising. Using reflexivity and the Movement Action Plan as an analytical tool, the case study reflects on the activist role archival research and development projects can potentially play, using the Who Am I? and Trust and Technology Projects as exemplars. The paper explores how an extended suite of rights in records, stretching beyond discovery and access to appraisal, description and disclosure, and linked to records continuum concepts of co-creation and multiple provenance, and the emergent concept of the participatory archive, might support community self-determination in the context of human rights and social justice agendas, with particular reference to the rights of the child. Additionally, the paper explores a new concept of archival autonomy and its relationship to community self-determination. Archival autonomy is tentatively defined as the ability for individuals and communities to participate in societal memory, with their own voice, and to become participatory agents in recordkeeping and archiving for identity, memory and accountability purposes. The achievement of archival autonomy is identified as a grand societal challenge, with the need for archival activism to become an integral part of social movements on a local and global scale. The paper concludes with a proposed National Summit on the Archive and the Rights of the Child, envisaged as a vehicle for archival advocacy and activism leading to transformative action to address social justice and human rights agendas in Australia.

The eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC) has produced EAC-CPF XML outputs from web resources for many years. Using the Find & Connect web resource project as a case study, this article explores the uses that the ESRC has developed for EAC-CPF data, including online presentation of descriptive contextual information, as the basis of online search services, as a system-independent and preservable copy of research datasets, and as a harvestable data source for interoperability with other datasets. Also covered are expanded uses of the EAC-CPF schema for describing a wider range of contextual entities beyond corporate bodies, persons and families.

This paper is interested in the significance of Australian football to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of Australia. In particular, this paper is interested in the cultural power of football and how it has foregrounded the struggle and highlighted the contribution that Indigenous people have made to the national football code of Australia. This paper also discusses key moments in Indigenous football history in Australia. It questions further that a greater understanding of this contribution needs to be more fully explored from a national perspective in order to appreciate Indigenous peoples' contribution to the sport not just in elite competitions but also at a community and grass roots level.

Public institutions involved in research that aims to strengthen the productivity, profitability and adaptiveness of industries face a multiplicity of challenges when managing for the emergence of cost effective solutions to problems. We reflect upon the learnings of a Government sponsored Visiting Fellow’s programme that we describe as a knowledge management (KM) intervention within Australia’s primary industries Research, Development and Extension (R, D and E) system. Our central concern is to draw upon the learnings of an internet-based initiative in the United States called eXtension to show how ‘traditional’ D and E activities can be transformed. We argue that organisations and networks involved in such D and E activities need to perceive themselves as belonging to systems that are socio-technical in nature. That is, the development and deployment of cross-jurisdictional and cross-institutional innovations are shaped by both the social interactions between people and the systematic use of technology to support distributed learning. We explain how the elements of an integrated model to support public KM can be developed to create the conditions for enhanced innovation. Our findings have relevance to a wide range of other industry sectors considering contemporary service models involving public and private partnerships.

The construction of the new Melbourne School of Design (MSD) Building offered a unique opportunity to capture and document the entire building design and construction process. Documentation was collected from every stage of the project, from the initial design competition held in 2009 to data generated during the current operational phase. This information has been captured in the Melbourne School of Design Building Archive and made available to staff, students, researchers and the broader university community in order to provide a comprehensive resource for future teaching, learning and research. The archive contains tens of thousands of images, documents, drawings and other items of information generated throughout the life of the project. The aim of this paper is to describe what was learnt from the process of creating an archive of a building project in real time. The major challenge as well as greatest opportunity faced in the process of archiving the project was the live nature of the project. The archive represents an important resource that very rarely exists for building projects and its establishment and the processes involved can be seen as a useful model for the production of similar resources for other building projects in the future.