National Library of Australia


Federation ephemera digitisation project

Project participants: State Library of New South Wales in cooperation with the University of Sydney Library's Australian Federation full text database project.

Project description: The State Library of New South Wales will create an digital archive of approximately 800 pages of Federation ephemera. Ephemera in the Archive will cover the whole Federation process from the late 1880s through 1901 and include the conventions, debates, constitutional developments, referenda and the ultimate proclamation and inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia. It will contain examples from most states of Australia with the main emphasis on New South Wales and to a lesser degree, Victoria.

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Content: An unpublished album compiled predominantly from material addressed to Mr. Alfred Lee will form the basis of the material to be selected for digitisation. Lee, a noted collector of Australiana, was influenced by close friends Frank Bladen and David Scott Mitchell, the State Library's great founding benefactor. In 1906 Lee sold his entire collection to Mitchell who in turn donated it along with his own collection to the State.

The album is comprehensive and contains a wide variety of printed ephemera including menus, invitations, certificates, broadsides, postcards etc. It also contains more substantial publications and documents such as souvenir programs, government gazettes, official speeches, and special issues of newspapers or journals which provide a detailed textual and pictorial record of the history of Federation and the Celebrations of the Inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia in January 1901. Selected images from these publications will also be incorporated in the Archive and supplemented by other material from the Mitchell and Dixson collections.

Digitisation policy and priorities: The State Library has a digitisation policy but it is not yet available on the World Wide Web.
Timetable: Continuing - due to be completed July 2001.
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Cataloguing and indexing: Clients will access the material through comprehensive records in the State Library's Innopac catalogue, WEBCAT using Innovative Interfaces External Image Linking product.
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Project managers wishing to update the details of their Australian digitisation projects, should send the changes to ALG Administration.

Last modified: October 20 2009.