Diana Giese visits the Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre at the University of Melbourne What can the history of science and technology contribute to our under-standing of how we live now, and how we might better manage the future? Work in cutting-edge areas such as medical science and environmental sustainability can only proceed from sound knowledge of what has gone before. This is what motivates the Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre, based at the University of Melbourne. It is interested in harnessing the Information Technology revolution, particularly digital technologies, to preserve and share our scientific heritage. ‘What we are trying to do on the Web is create cultural national parks, public spaces of intrinsic value that become part of our heritage,’ says the Centre’s Director, Gavan McCarthy. ‘We structure and manage information, including archives and artefacts, and material on the built and natural environments, to make it work and last. Then the Web provides everyone, from schoolkids to PhDs, with access in an integrated way.’ The Centre grew out of the Australian Science Archives Project, set up in 1985 by Professor Rod Home of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. Rather than keeping archives itself, it works with established repositories. In 1988, Bicentenary funding was used to start work on a guide to science archives in Australia held in museums, libraries and historical societies. The project established strong links with the National Library, the National Archives, the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering. Further funding in 1990 made possible the publication of the Guide to the Archives of Science in Australia: Records of Individuals, listing primary sources and activity over time.
Housed by Melbourne University, the Centre since 1999 has been funded from collaborative projects with government and industry, from consultancies, by philanthropic trusts, and through research funding such as a couple of major Australian Research Council (ARC) grants. The Centre has done contract work for the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research and the Anti-Cancer Council of Victoria. It has worked on successful projects for heritage organisations, families and individuals. All projects are carried out in the context of a philosophy of why memory, including corporate memory, matters. Unless information is available about the people, history and context of scientific achievement, understanding of the development of scientific ideas, changing practices and evolving institutional structures, will be lost. Says McCarthy: ‘Scientists, while keen on knowledge generation, have been most reluctant to fund knowledge preservation. If they’re not careful, this attitude may prove to be a major weakness threatening the future of sustainable scientific research in Australia.’ The Centre aims to be proactive, and to communicate what it finds to research communities and a general audience, here and overseas, now and in the future.
From 1992, an ARC Infrastructure Support Grant of $100 000 a year (for three years) allowed the Centre to develop content and computer systems and to set up a Canberra office. In 1995, the Centre won a contract with the State Electricity Commission of Victoria for the documentation and management of the records of six different power providers. With a contracted staff of 35, including archivists and people to run the servers, the Centre imaged 3.3 million documents, including technical records of the power industry. The first phase of the project was completed in seven months. The imaged files were selected to improve access and facilitate sharing between the newly incorporated entities. Now they’re available through the Public Records Office, as well as through the generating companies themselves. During the same period, the Centre undertook some major projects with Victorian pharmaceutical companies.
In 2000 and 2001, the Centre obtained Centenary of Federation money to work on Federation and Meteorology, about the Bureau of Meteorology, set up in 1908. It has worked on several projects focussing on Indigenous issues, including one about agreements, treaties and negotiated settlements, with ARC and ATSIC (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission) funds. Since 1995, McCarthy and staff members Joanne Evans and Helen Morgan have been invited to participate in the development of international standards in information technology. Cooperative links with related bodies, here and overseas, are constantly fostered. One of the Centre’s best-known projects is Bright Sparcs, an interlinked database of movers-and-shakers in the development of science, technology and medicine in Australia. The basic details of their professional lives, ‘the roles they played, where they worked, who they worked with, what they worked on, and what they achieved’, are linked to archival, print and online sources. Letters, photographs, diaries, notebooks, reports, sound recordings, papers and media are made accessible. Some of the best links direct people to other key science sites, such as the Australian Academy of Science’s Biographical Memoirs or the Physics in Australia to 1945 biographical and bibliographical register. From 2000 listings in 1994, the Bright Sparcs site has grown to 4400, fully indexed by the Google search engine. There is also an online Teachers’ Guide, with study units, questions and topics for further study, puzzles and information guides. ‘We wanted to be the hub site taking you to interesting information about people and organisations,’ says Gavan McCarthy. ‘That way, you mimic networks in human society, with only about six clicks between one entity and another. Using hyperlink capabilities, we’re building the networks that form a framework for e-scholarship.’
Other major resources the Centre manages include Technology in Australia, 1788–1988, a reference history of Australian innovation and adaptation. The original print edition was largely the work of Fellows of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering. One of the key outcomes apart from getting the full text online, was to have the people and organisations mentioned in the index systematically linked to Bright Sparcs and its companion database, Australian Science at Work (see http://www.austehc.unimelb.edu.au/tia/) The staff of the Centre see themselves as enablers—providing the tools for others to open up their collections. ‘We’ve always tried to develop generic software tools that any historian or archivist can use in the informatics area,’ says McCarthy. They pride themselves on a successful record of appraising collections, processing, cataloguing and managing them, and passing on these skills so that an archive can continue to grow in an orderly way. The Heritage Documentation Management System (HDMS) they have developed provides information on provenance—the creators of the records; on series—the sets or sequences into which the records fall; and inventory—individual items. Information in the databases is designed to be readily transferred to other public archives, and to receive data from them. It is configured so that it is easy to transform into hard copy or multimedia publications. For organisations with unruly collections, McCarthy and his colleagues, building on ground-breaking work at the National Archives, have developed an ingenious portable rig which can digitise 800 images a day, labelling them as it proceeds so they’re easy to locate. As a result of this process, whole collections can be made available online, or as DVDs or CDs. The rig is simple and cheap: $5000 buys a computer and imaging software, a camera with a stand, and lights. ‘And you can plug everything into any PC for even less,’ says McCarthy.
As an example of what’s possible, he instances the Brown Family Guide to Records. Dr Gilbert Brown was a pioneer of anaesthesia in Australia, and first President of the Australian Society of Anaesthetists. Dr Marie Brown worked with the Mothers and Babies Health Association over a long medical career. Their son Ian worked for 36 years with the CSIRO Division of Industrial Chemistry. This very personal family collection includes a mix of records covering almost 200 years of English and Australian history, from nineteenth-century scrapbooks to 1960s colour slides. Having complete collections online revolutionises access to archival materials and all but replaces the need for photocopying. McCarthy hopes this use of technology will create a greater sense of connection with our shared cultural heritage, as it builds both physical and virtual communities. ‘With so many forces at work in the modern world alienating individuals from community, this use of technology actively supports the growth of social capital,’ he says. At the University of Melbourne, the Centre also teaches the course ‘Fact, Fiction and Fraud in the Digital Age’, a subject for second- and third-year undergraduates. The course provides ‘essential skills for the information age worker,’ and attracts a variety of students, in areas from Law to Software Engineering. The lectures cover a variety of Web skills and technologies, including the topical propagation of urban myths through email and Websites. (See http://www.austehc.unimelb.edu.au/teaching/tfac/) The Centre also prides itself on being able to make available unpromising but potentially valuable material. When it learnt that 25 hours of interview material had been recorded with Nobel Prizewinner Sir Macfarlane Burnet, one of Australia’s most eminent scientists, they were thrilled. ‘But the tapes turned out to be of the lowest technical quality, and 10 years old,’ says McCarthy. Undaunted, the Centre digitised them and has made them available on CD, broken into five-minute sound bytes. The CDs, along with the rest of the Burnet Collection, are available through the University of Melbourne Archives. Gavan McCarthy is feisty about the future. In 1994, he noted of the new world of the Web: ‘The field is open—it’s like the Wild West. We want to go out and claim as much territory as we can.’ Now, he reflects: ‘We are still at the pioneering frontier. Experience has made us a lot wiser—but it hasn’t dimmed our vision of what is possible, and what we can contribute.’ The Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre can be found online at: www.austehc.unimelb.edu.au. Scientists DIANA GIESE has interviewed for the National Library, and who are also listed by Bright Sparcs, include Isobel Bennett, John Stocker, David Penington and Graeme Clark. Thanks to Gavan McCarthy for providing photographs |
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