ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 68 | April 2004
PictureAustralia: Swinburne University of Technology and Wollongong City Library Join Up
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| Roxanne Missingham (National Library of Australia) and Rod Oxley (General Manager, Wollongong City Council) launch Wollongong Library’s participation in PictureAustralia |
Two more image collections were added to PictureAustralia recently. The Swinburne University of Technology launched its participation in February, with 762 images. These date from 1914 and provide an historical tour through education at Swinburne over most of the last century, portraying staff and students engaged in classes, social activities, sporting activities and official functions.
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| [Junior
laundry class, 1915] , Swinburne University of Technology |
Many of the photographs depict students undertaking classroom activities in art, carpentry, chemistry, science, commerical studies (such as typing), domestic science, engineering, trades, as well as cake decorating, car detailing, astronomy, blacksmithing and dressmaking. The addition of these images helps to add another important aspect of Australian life to PictureAustralia.
Wollongong City Library became the tenth public library to add its images to PictureAustralia, after a successful launch in Wollongong in March.
The Library's Illawarra Images photographic database is a unique collection of over 15 000 pictures of the Illawarra district, from 1832 to the present day, taken from the collections of the Wollongong City Library and Illawarra Historical Society.
It includes sketches, watercolours, paintings and photographs depicting the growth and development of the area from the days of earliest settlement through to the present. The collection features images of people, places, events, industry and the landscape.
Susan Roberts, Manager of the Wollongong City Library noted that this collection is one of the largest digitised photographic collections held by a public library anywhere in Australia. Digitisation of this collection has greatly expanded access to the collection while at the same time reducing the need to handle photographs and thus reducing the risk of damage to photographs in the collection.
For more information, contact: Elise Edmonds, Manager, PictureAustralia; ; <www.pictureaustralia.org/>.
| Contents list for this issue of Gateways |