ANZAC Connections: delivering and connecting real content and data online

Abstract

The Australian War Memorial is currently serving an enormous public appetite for access to its data. The data, created from a decade of digitisation and indexing of the collections, are a rich vein for research and understanding the Australian experience of war. Currently, the public are unable to efficiently extract and use these data, as they are not published in an open and interoperable format. The Memorial's Research Centre regularly assists researchers by providing spreadsheets and CSV files of its data. It also handles thousands of public enquiries each month, helping people use and interpret the databases and access the collections. The Anzac Connections project is the Memorial's major First World War centenary initiative, aimed at making more effective use of its data to enable the public to discover and search the collections more independently and successfully. This will provide efficiencies in resourcing public enquiries and improve regional access to the collections. The project is also focused on unlocking and sharing these data in the web environment for broader public research and reuse. This article is not about showcasing a completed project, but demonstrates the Memorial's concept and discusses the issues, difficulties and problems overcome along the way.