National Library of Australia Staff Papers, 2000

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Exploring the highlands of Papua New Guinea through the resources at the National Library of Australia

research tools for remote access

 

A paper presented by Chris Foster Manager, Overseas Collection Development Unit, National Library of Australia at the Pacific History Association Conference, Bursting Boundaries: Places, Persons, Gender and Disciplines on 29 June 2000.

Abstract

This paper showcases a selection of resources to highlight the way in which the Internet and digitisation activities have enhanced the researcher's access to the National Library's rich and diverse collections. An increasing proportion of manuscript finding aids are available on the Library's website and pictorial images from the collection can be viewed through the IMAGES1 database. The Library is working co-operatively with other institutions to provide tools of discovery that span the resources of multiple institutions.


I've chosen two collections held by the National Library of Australia to showcase not simply our holdings but the way in which we provide access to the collections beyond the boundaries of the building.

The first collection is the Pat Walsh manuscript collection. Walsh was the medical assistant on the Hagen-Sepik patrol expedition into central New Guinea in 1938-1939. The other members in the patrol were Ian Downs, John Black and Jim Taylor and their papers are also held at the National Library. This patrol was the longest in PNG history - some 15 months and covering 3,000 kilometres. The patrol left from Mt Hagen in March 1938 and walked to the Dutch New Guinea border. Base camps were set up at Hoiyevia in the Southern Highlands and at Wabag.

Walsh's collection has been described and listed in a finding aid. The collection contains field diaries, notebooks, two written up diaries and a very large collection of photographs. It is the finding aid that provides the key into the collection describing the documentary records and the listing all the individual photographs. The finding list has been marked up in HTML 1 and is mounted on the Library's website2 . This means that the researcher can do a certain amount of preparatory work before making the journey to the National Library in Canberra.

The photographs are John Black's copies of Walsh's photographs. The other sets have all been lost; the official set and those belonging to Jim Taylor were lost during World War II and Walsh's own copy was destroyed in the 1974 Brisbane flood. Most of the photographs listed carry Walsh's captions and the remaining captions have been provided by Dr Bill Gammage. The photographs bring the story of the expedition to life, showing the people, places and rugged terrain. By means of illustration I have had a few of the photographs scanned for this presentation.

[Photographs not reproduced in this paper]

At this stage, it is only the finding lists that are available on the web to provide a guide for the remote researcher. None of these types of collections have been digitised to actually allow the researcher to view and use the material from afar, but projects are underway3 and some of them have been mentioned earlier today.

The path of discovery for the intrepid researcher might be by way of the Library's catalogue. Using relevant search terms to find a record in the catalogue it is then possible to follow the embedded link to the finding aid and from that to find the specific box or photograph of interest. However, the National Library is one of many collecting institutions with resources that may be of interest to the researcher, and may not be an obvious choice. Therefore, tools like the Register of Australian Archives and Manuscripts (RAAM)4 are instrumental in providing a means of more easily searching the collections of many institutions through one central access point. Libraries and archives contribute entries to RAAM and where possible links are made to online finding aids. Although there can be no substitute for examining a collection first hand, there's much to be gained from being able to assess the depth and breadth of the collection prior to making the trip to the institution where the collection is physically held.

Another collection that has been acquired in a similar manner is a collection of photographs taken on three trips made by Mick Leahy and Mick Dwyer in 1930 and 1931. The first trip was from Lae to the Eastern Highlands via the Markham and Ramu valleys, then down the Purari River to the coast. The party took a boat down to Port Moresby and then returned to Lae via Kokoda. The second trip was into the Eastern Highlands again. On the third trip they explored the Watut-Langimar headwaters west of Wau.

All these journeys met places and people never before visited by Europeans. The first two in particular revealed peoples and cultures undreamt of by the outside world. In 1929 two Lutheran missionaries became the first Europeans to enter the highlands; Mick's first journey was second, went further, and was the first to carry a camera.

These photos may be the oldest ever taken of Highlanders. Both in composition and clarity, they lack the quality of the photos taken in 1933, when his Leica camera and work were of professional standard. Possibly they are culls from a bigger collection - other prints exist from this time. Yet some shots are very good and all are of considerable importance."5

The images offered to the Library were nitrate negatives so the Library suggested that taking copies of the prints would be the preferred option. We now have print copies in an album together with a captioned list. All the images were scanned as part of the routine digitisation of new acquisitions and will soon be loaded from the CD-ROM onto the IMAGES16 database and will be accessible from anywhere in the world.

The Library's policy is to digitise new materials being added to the Pictorial Collection and part of the normal acquisition process is to gain permission to digitise the works. The Pictorial section has a rolling program to work through the collection to retrospectively digitise and load other pictorial materials. This will probably only ever be a selective process based on identified priorities and likelihood of use. The collection contains some 600,000 images and to date 26,000 have been digitised.

Of course the National Library holds other documents relating to this journey, but my choice of the photographs is to illustrate how we have enabled remote access.

In much the same way as the Library worked with other institutions to develop RAAM, we have been working to develop a single point of access to the distributed digitised pictorial collections of collecting institutions. The possibility was tested in the ImageSearch project by the National Library in partnership with the state libraries of New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania and the Australian War Memorial. Based on the success of the project, the National Library will be launching a new service called PictureAustralia later in the year which will provide free access Australia's digitised cultural heritage images available on the Internet. The service is currently in acceptance testing mode, and with that proviso, is available for viewing at http://www.pictureaustralia.org/. The emphasis is on Australian images but all but one of the participating institutions have loaded all their digitised image data without limiting the content to only Australian images. The intention is to expand the range of contributors to include archives, museums and others as well as overseas institutions that may have Australian images.

With the high volume of experimental and ground-breaking work that is being undertaken in the field of digitisation it is important that our efforts are complementary rather than duplicative. To this end the National Library maintains an online register7 of Australian digitisation projects to record and make accessible information about the various projects that are being undertaken within the Australian cultural community - libraries, museums, archives and other private and public institutions who are engaged in projects involving digisitation.


Footnotes

1 The Library plans to move to use of encoded Archival Description. For more information refer to http://www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/ead/
2 http://www.nla.gov.au/ms/findaids/9219.html
3 The Library proposes to digitise the Sir Edmund Barton manuscript collection. Other examples of projects in which the National Library is involved are the Australian Cooperative Digitisation Project 1840-1845 (http://www.nla.gov.au/ferg/) and the Endeavour [South Seas] Project(http://coombs.anu.edu.au/%7Ecookproj/ and http://www.nla.gov.au/pub/endeavour/)
4 http://www.nla.gov.au/raam/
5 From notes provided by Dr Bill Gammage to accompany the Mick Leahy photographs.
6 http://www.nla.gov.au/images1/
7 http://www.nla.gov.au/libraries/digitisation