Thread: Today the eScholarship Research Centre (@esrcmelb) is being disestablished by @unimelb. I started work at the ESRC twelve years ago this week, on 28 June 2008, and have remained (until today) an Honorary Fellow there. esrc.unimelb.edu.au
The Centre had "a focus on archival science, metadata, and contextual information. Our research aims to advance the discovery and interpretation of archival records, published literature, and research data for the benefit of the academic community and the greater public good.”
The ESRC was never a perfect place, but as the old saying goes, the perfect is the enemy of the good. And whatever its flaws and limitations, the ESRC did a lot of good.
Along with its predecessors the Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre (Austehc) and the Australian Science Archives Project (ASAP), the Centre spent 35 years capturing, preserving, and connecting information about Australian archives, collections, and history
and making that information more accessible and understandable, including via the web, as standards-based XML data, through digitisation work, and through extensive crossdisciplinary collaborations with a wide range of academics, universities, and community organisations.
It produced some of the earliest encyclopedia-style websites in Australia, including Bright Sparcs which went online in 1994. Now part of the Encyclopedia of Australian Science, if you have a Bright Sparcs link from 1994 it will still work today eoas.info/background.html
This shows the value of building digital resources on archival principles; of treating the web not just as a perpetual present where the only constant is change, but as a space which can also support longevity and continuity.
Austehc was involved in developing the first online version of the Australian Dictionary of Biography @NCB_ANU back in 2006 web.archive.org/web/2006110914…
For 20 years the Centre has supported @WomenAus and the Australian Women's Register:womenaustralia.info Together the Women's Register and the Encyclopedia of Australian Science were some of the first resources harvested by @TroveAustralia
The ESRC produced and published archival guides using standards-based archival listing software developed in-house. Many continue to use the Heritage Documentation Management System (HDMS) in Australian and internationally to this day esrc.unimelb.edu.au/#archival-guid…
The Find & Connect Web Resource @FaCWebResource (findandconnect.gov.au) has now been online for nearly a decade, providing invaluable information to Forgotten Australians, Former Child Migrants & anyone seeking information about the history of institutional 'care' in Australia.
Apart from being one of the biggest publicly-funded digital history projects in Aus, Find & Connect has also been an essential resource for the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse & the ongoing provision of support to people who grew up in 'care'.
Thankfully @FaCWebResource will continue, as will some of the other projects which started their life at the ESRC. But many will not, and some really good people with good ideas will need to find other places to work.
There is so much more I could say. The ESRC and its predecessors worked on so many projects—more than 800 of then—and was in many ways unique: a research centre staffed by archivists, historians, and their collaborators, working on archival, digital and public history projects.
A key driver was a commitment to supporting communities, connecting people & knowledge, and aiming to do things for the public good. Perhaps some of these commitments, sometimes pursued at the expense of things like research metrics, contributed to the closure of the ESRC today.
There were other reasons too—some internal, many external, related to university priorities and politics, and the problem posed by a place that didn't comfortably fit within existing organisational structures—but overall it feels to me like there was still important work to do.
Many of us who have worked there take foundational ideas and values into other roles. My PhD, my current work, and my forthcoming book all contain numerous ideas which can be traced back to some of the core concepts underpinning the work of the Centre.
Now @unimelb needs to work out how to effectively preserve and maintain access to a 35 year legacy, including over 25 years of digital outputs. Quite a challenge, but an important one if the work of the ESRC is to remain available and visible.
It's essential that happens, not just because these are scholarly assets or assets to the university, or because of the ESRC's important place in the broader history of Australian archival and digital humanities practice (though both are true).
It's essential because much of the work of the Centre was focused on community and public knowledge—on improving access to and understanding of archives, collections, and history. People still use and rely on those resources every day.
These are public assets, community assets, and though today the ESRC is being disestablished it's important that legacy is recognised by @unimelb and the broader archival and scholarly community, now and into the future.
I hope that today, alongside everything else that is happening, we can recognise the value and importance of places like @esrcmelb. And I hope that, despite the state of the unversity sector, there is still space for some of the concepts and ideals that underpinned their work.
Finally, if you're new to @esrcmelb and their work, today is a good day to explore and find out why archives, history, digital humanities, social and cultural informatics, and many other fields will all be a little worse off from tomorrow morning. [End]
