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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 50| April 2001


Australian Cooperative Digitisation Project

Prof. E. Webby & Jan Fullerton

At a reception held at the National Maritime Museum, Sydney in January 2001, Professor Elizabeth Webby launched the Australian Periodical Publications 1840–1845 web site, the primary product of the Australian Cooperative Digitisation Project (ACDP).

The main purpose of this project, which was jointly funded by the participating partners and the Australian Research Council, was to ensure access to, and preservation of, rare and fragile nineteenth-century material. The selected material includes journals, newspapers, novels and short stories published in Australia during the period 1840–45.

The collaboration between the University of Sydney Library, State Library of New South Wales, National Library of Australia and Monash University Library, has made approximately 70 000 pages from about 50 mid-nineteenth-century Australian serials, accessible together for the first time. The material is accessible to anyone, anywhere, at any time (if they have access to a computer and an Internet connection).

Professor Webby, of the University of Sydney, chaired the Steering Committee guiding the ACDP from its inception in the mid-1990s. She was a particularly appropriate person to launch the site, as she was able to speak not just of the challenges that the project had encountered and overcome, but also of the profound research value of this material for anyone interested in Australian life and society at such a formative stage immediately preceding the gold rushes of the 1850s.

The completed digitised titles are now available on the web at www.nla.gov.au/ferg.
—Colin Webb

Above: Professor Elizabeth Webby, Professor of Australian Literature, University of Sydney, (left) and Director-General of the NLA, Jan Fullerton, at the launch of the Australian Periodical Publications 1840–1845 web site

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