Australian Society of Archivists
1999 Conference
Information Economy and Electronic Record
Keeping:
An Australian Perspective
- In the future if we are to maintain and celebrate our national
character in the global cultural environment we will need to nurture
that which is uniquely ours, while engaging in an open dialogue with
the world community.
- At present it is estimated that 85% of Internet content accessed
by Australians has been sourced overseas. In the face of this fact
we will have to develop new ways to promote our culture to ourselves
and to the rest of the world, and to ensure its integrity and
growth.
- The developing online environment presents many opportunities for
Australian cultural artifacts, products and forms to be marketed,
promoted and made accessible to a much wider audience within
Australia and the rest of the world.
- Government-funded projects such as
Australia's Cultural Network,
the Archives of Australia
website, the Australian
Libraries Gateway and Australian
Museums Online have been instrumental in aiding the
development of the online presence of many cultural institutions.
- Australian archives, libraries, museums and galleries have a
great tradition of providing access to their collections. The
digitisation of collection materials is making an extraordinary
wealth of information and virtual artifacts accessible, enabling
increasing numbers of people to experience, engage with, and learn
from our heritage.
- Approximately 1.2 million people visit the State Library of New
South Wales headquarters in Macquarie Street, Sydney each year.
Currently there are 800,000 hits per month on the
SLNSW website, as users from
throughout NSW tap into a resource that has traditionally been out
of reach.
- Such increasingly important sectors as education, cultural
tourism and the leisure and entertainment industries can benefit
from greater access to our distributed national collections,
developing better cultural products and services as a result.
- However, much basic online infrastructure is yet to be put in
place in outer metropolitan, rural and remote communities. Many
regional archives, libraries and other collecting institutions are
still without basic Internet access or the resources to establish a
web presence. Many are unclear of the benefits of the information
age, or how to go about engaging with it.
- This situation presents a challenge we all have to address. Among
other things, rural, regional and remote archives, libraries,
museums and galleries should be encouraged to become ‘online
hubs', making onsite access to the Internet available to the
communities within which they belong.
- The Archives of
Australia website is doing much to aid affiliated
organisations to become web aware, including through measures such
as making available a number of resources and guides, (including
website templates) and by hosting the archives of a range of
entities (eg the Canberra Church of England Girls' Grammar School
and the New South Wales Parliamentary Archives).
- As you would be well aware, traditionally, when you make use of
an archival record you are often accessing the only copy in
existence. Because of their age archives can be fragile and the
information they contain is vulnerable to damage or loss through
constant or improper handling.
- For example, archival records are kept in environmentally
controlled conditions to minimise their deterioration, they may not
be browsed on the shelves as in a library, and they may not be
borrowed. When requested by researchers they are delivered to
reading rooms where they must be used under supervision.
- The digitisation process is helping open up the information
strongholds of our collecting institutions, though the process of
digitising archival records is still expensive and time-consuming,
and although much important catalogue information is increasingly
available, it is unlikely that many collections will be fully
accessible online for quite some time yet.
- However, initiatives such as the State Library of New South Wales’
Sir Joseph Banks papers and the National
Archives of Australia’s ‘Founding Documents Website’
mean important documents are being released from protective storage
around the country, interpreted and displayed on websites for all
Australians to engage with and enjoy, wherever they are.
- Important initiatives being conducted within the
Department of Communications,
Information Technology and the Arts include supplying
secretariat support to the Cultural Ministers Council (CMC). The CMC
established the New Technologies Working Party (NTWP) at its
December 1996 meeting, with the aim of allowing greater access to
cultural content by enhancing the application of new digital
technologies within Australian cultural collecting institutions.
- The NTWP has met several times since its establishment and has
prepared a number of papers on technical standards (eg Z39.50,
Warwick Framework, Dublin Core, RDF and XML) and intellectual
property issues. Two papers building on issues highlighted in the
consultancy report have been generated as part of the Standing
Committee’s meeting on February 1998;
- The NTWP is a commissioning partner in the exciting ZAVIER
project, which explores the use of the Z39.50 communications
protocol in developing an Internet entry point for seamless online
access to a diverse range of distributed Victorian cultural
databases, including museums, libraries, galleries and archives.
- The CMC recognises that increased globalisation and new
technologies present new challenges and opportunities for
Australia's cultural institutions - especially the need to address
the impact of these on Australian cultural life. The CMC has agreed
to foster greater use of digital technology by Australia's cultural
sectors, in order to build new audiences; enhance the performance of
cultural institutions; and project Australia's culture into a global
market.
- The CMC has endorsed a 'vision' for a national strategic
framework for more effective use of digital technology, within which
Commonwealth, States/Territories and local government will work
together to:
- encourage new collaborative partnerships between cultural
organisations, government and private enterprise to produce
quality, market-oriented products and services;
- encourage best practice standards for inter-networked
cultural databases and collection management systems;
- identify issues relating to intellectual property rights in
cultural institutions and the development of national protocols
for copyright owners and users in the digital environment; and
- develop management models for integration of digital
technology and intellectual property within overall business
planning frameworks and practices at national and
State/territory cultural institution level.
- The CMC has also endorsed the development and national
distribution of The Digital Environment: New Technologies &
Australian Culture, a CD-ROM produced by the NTWP for distribution
to government and cultural institutions across Australia. This CD
outlines suggested approaches to digitisation issues such as content
identification, copyright and database interoperability.
- Organisations and individuals dealing with Australian cultural
archives can achieve innumerable efficiencies in their business
practices by utilising the electronic environment. I would like to
discuss some developments within archives concerned with screen
culture in order to illustrate some examples of the opportunities
electronic recordkeeping is presenting in the Information Age.
- ScreenSound Australia
is home to Australia's largest archive of recorded screen and sound
images, comprising over two million items, including television and
sound recordings, thousands of newsreels, a huge variety of scripts,
posters and film stills, and over one hundred years of Australian
films.
- Managing the collection is a huge task. To cope with the great
variety of material held by it, ScreenSound Australia developed
innovative computer software, known as MAVIS (the Merged Audio
Visual Information System), now being marketed to audiovisual
archives throughout the world, including the Library of Congress.
- E-commerce activities will become increasingly important income
pillars for archives of Australian culture such as ScreenSound
Australia. In addition to the sale of physical products drawn from
the ScreenSound collection, it may be possible for an income stream
to be derived from 'pay-per-view' type delivery of products over
broadband systems.
- An area crucial to the commercial utilisation of archives online
is the management of copyright. An example of an electronic solution
to this problem is the Screen Windows Into Film Titles (SWIFT)
project being developed by Cinemedia.
SWIFT aims to provide effective management of audiovisual titles in
the digital environment, including:
- efficient storage of large volumes of compressed digital
video material;
- cataloguing of titles;
- flexible copyright management and user access controls;
- an easy-to-use W3 access interface;
- pay-per-view online billing systems; and
- automated disbursement of returns to content owners.
- The opportunities for other than audiovisual archives to take
advantage of this development work are intriguing to consider.
- Convergence will bring a number of interactive services into
homes throughout Australia, creating the environment for a range of
entirely new digital cultural products and services and stimulating
unforeseeable expressions of our unique cultural identity. All sorts
of Australian archives will be in a position to exploit this
opportunity, and should be planning for it.
- The technologies of the information age will bring increasing
opportunities for the propagation of Australian culture - the
challenge will be to ensure a distinctly Australian voice is heard
amongst the hubbub of global discourse.
- In closing, I'd like to mention my interest in the National
Library of Australia's PANDORA Archive, (http://www.nla.gov.au/pandora/index.html),
a digital archive dedicated to the preservation of and long term
access to Australian online publications and websites of national
significance.
- Given the inherent volatility of electronic records of this type,
it is important that a Federal government agency is taking the lead
in making sure such virtual artifacts like these will be available a
hundred years from now for avid researchers to comb through and
learn about how Australia expressed itself in cyberspace at the tail
end of the 20th century.
- How much richer would Australia's cultural memory be now be if a
national collecting institution concerned with film and television
had existed from the early days of Australia's motion picture
industry?
- Though it is unclear how exactly the PANDORA archive may be of
economic significance for future generations, its cultural worth
will no doubt increase as this thing we call the Internet transmutes
over time.
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