Launch of Electronic Regional Archives Project

Dec 10, 2003

The Electronic Regional Archives Digitisation Project will be launched today (Tuesday 9 December) by the Federal Member for Cunningham, Mr Michael Organ, at the University of Wollongong.

It is a joint project involving the universities of Wollongong, Newcastle and New England. Australian Archives has also co-operated in the overall project.

Funding for the project came from an Australian Research Council Linkage, Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities Grant. As University Archivist, Mr Organ was one of the original applicants for the funding of the project known as "Unlocking Regional Memory".

"A year later, readers are able not only to know the holdings of distant archives but summon the actual texts of documents to their own computer screens," according to the principal investigators in the project the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Professor Andrew Wells, and Professor Jim Hagan, also from the Faculty of Arts.

The project began in 2002 and has involved a variety of tasks such as the identification of high-demand archival holdings, digitising of archival holdings, the re-writing of existing archival guides to international protocol standards and the installation of equipment and website design.

"We eventually hope to make international archives available to Australian scholars," they said.They said evaluation results by potential users of the site have so far been extremely positive.

Launch time: 12.30pm Tuesday December 9.

Where: Library, Seminar Room 2, University of Wollongong.

For further information: Contact Professor Andrew Wells on 4221 3369 or Professor Jim Hagan on 4221 3682.

For more information, contact:

media@uow.edu.au
University of Wollongong
Ph: (02) 4221 5942; fax (02) 4221 3128