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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 48| December 2000
Australian Research Council funded projects in 2001
The Australian Research Council recently announced the Research Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities (RIEF) Scheme grants for 2001. The National Library is directly involved in three of these projects.
The first project, an Australian Research Library Network portal for resource sharing referred to as ARLIN, will involve 18 universities as well as the National Library. It aims to provide a technical solution for the delivery of research content to the higher education sector. The lead institution is La Trobe University. The Deputy Director-General, David Toll, is the National Librarys representative for this project.
The second is a continuation of the development of the Australian Literature Electronic Gateway in the form of enhancements. ALEG, as it is currently known, seeks to provide comprehensive access to Australian literary resources by providing for the efficient and effective discovery of essential information about all Australian writers and writing from European settlement to the present. National Library representatives are David Toll and Judith Pearce, Director, Web Services Branch.
The third project also seeks to extend an established service known as Weblawa subject gateway for Australian secondary legal material. It is hosted by the Law Foundation of NSW and provides access to Web-based resources for Australian legal researchers which have been identified in a collaborative manner. Roxanne Missingham of the Information Services Branch is the National Librarys representative on this project.
Two projects commenced this year, the South Seas project and the Asian Perceptions of Australia project, and will continue into 2001 and 2002. The South Seas project, formerly known as the Endeavour project, has two aims:
to exploit the potential of digital hypermedia as research medium to open new lines of research into James Cooks and Samuel Wallis Pacific voyages (1766-1771), and how the resulting encounters with indigenous Australian and Oceanic peoples influenced European intellectual and cultural history; and as a consequence, develop scholarly editing standards for digital historical editions, and a networked environment facilitating their national implementation. The project will produce a hypermedia edition of the journals of Cooks Endeavour voyage (1769-1771).
Parts of the National Librarys collection will be included in the journals.
As part of the Asian Perceptions of Australia project, National Library
staff have joined researchers from the Australian National University,
Griffith University and La Trobe University to examine Chinese and
Japanese perceptions of Australia based on the National Librarys own
extensive collections of both printed and special materials including
manuscripts, pictorial works and oral history records.
Debbie Campbell
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: dthomas@nla.gov.au