Archives & Manuscripts

Editorial

2025-10-31T15:43:58+00:00

Mela Mijimit, Dalimbat Mela Stori (We Together, We Telling Our Story)1: Exploring a Living Archive of Aboriginal Art and Knowledge – A Work in Progress …

2025-10-31T15:48:18+00:00

This article explores the Living Archive project as a process of knowledge exhchange within and between two Aboriginal communities, Ngukurr in southeast Arnhem Land and Maree Clarke (Mutti Mutti, Wamba Wamba, Yorta Yorta, Boonwurrung) and her family/community from southeast Australia. The article outlines the relationships formed and the work conducted by Aboriginal co-authors, alongside their non-Indigenous collaborators, when researching and revivifying Ancestral information in archives and museums. This processes of working together to reclaim the archives, reveals Indigenous knowledge systems determinately embedded in art-making. The dynamic process of art-making, inclusive of the relationality of Indigenous knowledges, contests linear and static Western archiving, revealing a rich system for archiving the past in the present for future generations. The article also discusses some of the setbacks the project encountered when striving to provide an appropriate and accessible digital database for the communities, so they can determine the most appropriate ways for engaging with their archived material collected throughout the project.

Unlocking the Archive: Cultural and Ethical Considerations Surrounding the Future of the Melanesian Film Archive

2025-10-31T15:54:17+00:00

The Melanesian Film Archive (MFA) is an extensive collection of medical and anthropological films. Medical films in the archive principally concern the work of Dr D. Carleton Gajdusek, Michael P. Alpers and others related to the aetiology of kuru, a neurodegenerative disease. The Archives’ anthropological collection comprises 513 research documentary films, mostly shot in Papua New Guinea (PNG) in the 1960s, but also in Melanesia, the Pacific region and elsewhere; anthropological records are supplemented by reel-to-reel audiotapes. This paper considers access and sharing complexities caused by recent preservation activities, including digitisation of these fragile and important films and associated documentation to preserve them for future researchers. Digitisation and possible digital repatriation of this material raise important cultural, legal and ethical considerations that must be addressed, including MFA data governance needs and Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) rights, access and sharing.

The Importance of Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Phyllis Mander-Jones, Australian-Pacific Historians, and the Australian Joint Copying Project, 1954–1966

2025-10-31T15:59:57+00:00

This article discusses the development of a surrogate (copied) archival collection, the Australian Joint Copying Project (AJCP). In the 1950s and 1960s, the AJCP was created as a research collection after the Second World War, specifically for researchers in Australia, New Zealand Aotearoa, and the Pacific Islands. As a social historian, I identify and analyse the collaborative relationships between the AJCP curator, Phyllis Mander-Jones, and Australian-based Pacific historians, to show how historiographical changes influenced the curation of this collection. Focusing on the AJCP as a case study illustrates the fact that the formation of a global network of librarians, archivists, and historians made the AJCP possible. Understanding the formation of the AJCP is particularly prescient now as the collection has been digitised, and present-day archival theorists and researchers are increasingly focused on the best practices for record reclassification and contextualisation.

User Needs in the Digital Archives of the Popular Movement

2025-10-31T16:11:50+00:00

A comprehensive understanding of user needs is required to support the development of useful digital archives. While archival science research has met this demand by inquiring into a significant range of user groups, users of popular movement archives remain understudied. Addressing this gap, this paper reports on a focus group study of key academic and professional users (N = 21) of popular movement archives. This study reveals user needs that are an amalgamation of informational, management-related, social, personal, and technical needs that principally emanate from the archival records themselves rather than the digital archive platform. Purposes and uses, archive and digital archive, disciplinary background, and expertise are four contexts of user needs with a significance of how users frame and express their record-finding and record-use needs in popular movement archives. The main conclusion of this study is that while it is important to recognize the heterogeneity of user groups and archives, it is similarly important to be aware and explicit about what kind of an archive a popular movement archive is for its different users and uses, and when developing a digital archive, what kind of an archive a particular digital popular movement archive is aiming to be and for whom.

Reflecting on the Place of Regional University Libraries and Archival Collections

2025-10-31T16:12:48+00:00

University archives sit in a unique space within the Australian archives landscape, with many serving a dual purpose. Archives may be collected and maintained as the historical memory of an institution. Others also act as archives for their local community or the state. Most Australian universities have a dedicated archive, and the Australian Society of Archivists (2024) has a Special Interest Group devoted to the sector (see Appendix 1: Foundation Dates of Universities and their Archives). This paper reflects on some of the different models offered at regional universities. As members of the Regional Universities Network, they share a particular context; each institution is committed to the broader community and serves the research and teaching purposes required in their establishment. Echoing early research on Australian university archives, however, there are marked differences in their approaches to managing archives, different functions and strategic alignment and diverse organisational arrangements.[i] Prompted by the initiative to develop a university archive at SCU, we would like to reflect on the strengths and challenges, limitations and possibilities of different models, how each archive relates to the business of the university, and echoing Boadle, to ask whether they function as a community or university resource.[ii] Centring the place of regional universities, this paper also allowed us to collaborate and traverse the boundaries between our institutions and within them, as well as between the university and community.

[i] N. Allen, ‘University archives in Australia’, Australian Academic & Research Libraries, vol. 19, no. 3, 1988, pp. 173-179. http://doi.org/10.1080/00048623.1988.10754626; D. Boadle, ‘Australian university archives and their prospects’, Australian Academic & Research Libraries, vol. 30, no. 3, 1999, pp. 153-170. http://doi.org/10.1080/00048623.1999.10755090

[ii] D. Boadle, ‘Academic or community resource? Stakeholder interests and collection management at Charles Sturt University Regional Archives 1973-2003’, The Australian Library Journal, vol. 52, no. 3, 2003, pp. 273-286. http://doi.org/10.1080/00049670.2003.10721555