ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 60 | December 2002
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Moreton
Bay Fig Growing Through Bench—New Farm Park, 1994
Image no. A1500, K1220
Brisbane City Council Library |
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| Rollingstone
Station, March 1922 Paluma Collection, Image no. 0000002 Thuringowa City Library |
PictureAustralia: Celebrating a Milestone
As we head into the festive season, PictureAustralia is celebrating a milestone. The Internet-based service that allows users to search multiple online pictorial collections from the search screen has just had its twentieth participating agency join and contribute an image collection to the service.
Hot on the heels of the Brisbane City Council Library, which recently made over 6000 images of Brisbane life, from the late 19th century through to the present day, available through PictureAustralia, comes the Thuringowa City Library from north Queensland. They add over 1000 images from their local history collection to the service, bringing the total number of images available to the user to over 600 000. The variation in life and endeavour in Queensland is now well represented.
PictureAustralia was launched in 2000 with seven contributing cultural agencies and around 470 000 images. In the last two years, 13 agencies have added to the richness and diversity of the collections available to researchers, historians, students and the general public. The contributing agencies now include libraries, museums, galleries, archives, universities, historical societies and other cultural organisations. The National Library of New Zealand and the Scottish cultural portal SCRAN currently represent the offshore element of this group—providing access through PictureAustralia to Australian content held overseas.
If it was photographed,
painted or somehow captured pictorially, there is a good chance you will find
it on PictureAustralia. Of course, there are the icons—Sidney Nolan, Daisy Bates,
Slim Dusty, Evonne Goolagong, Uluru, the Sydney Harbour Bridge. However, you
will also find the quiet achievers and the little-known places—carols in the
local park, drought in Beveridge, Victoria, bushfires at Fassifern, New South
Wales, and Christmas celebrations in home towns everywhere. Get online and lose
yourself in this wonderful, national, collaborative resource today at www.pictureaustralia.org.
—Danielle Freeman
| Contents list for this issue of Gateways |
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: gateways@nla.gov.au