National Archives Of Australia Research Articles

E-learning with docugames: AE2 Commander

Mark Brogan and Martin Masek teach and research in the School of Computer and Security Science at Edith Cowan University. Dr Brogan teaches and researches enterprise information management and digital recordkeeping. With Associate Professor Karen Murcia, Dr Masek coordinates research activity in ECU’s Research Centre for Transformational Games.1 This paper describes outcomes from user acceptance testing of AE2 Commander2 – a docugame released as alpha software in April 2011 by ECU’s Research Centre for Transformational Games. Docugames form a genre of serious games that employ digitised copy of historical sources as part of the game narrative. The design and development of AE2 Commander began in 2009, when the authors received an Ian MacLean Award 3 from the National Archives of Australia (NAA) to build an authentic role-play game based on the exploits of the World War I Australian submarine AE2. The design brief required the designers to develop a strategy for incorporating digitised copy of archival records held by the NAA and to measure the e-learning and engagement outcomes that were achieved with the docugame format. In an earlier Archives and Manuscripts article, the authors introduced the methods and technologies of computer game design and development used to produce AE2 Commander.4 This paper reviews the learning outcomes that have been achieved with the game and the player reaction to the inclusion of authentic digital recreations of historical source records. The topic is significant within the context of e-learning, but also more generally, as many cultural heritage institutions seek new ways of engaging audiences through the leveraging of serious games.

Cultural policy and Australia's national cultural heritage: issues and challenges in the GLAM landscape

In 2012 the Australian Commonwealth government was scheduled to release the first dedicated policy for culture and the arts since the Keating government's Creative Nation (1994). Investing in a Creative Australia was to appear after a lengthy period of consultation between the Commonwealth government and all interested cultural sectors and organisations. When it eventuates, the policy will be of particular interest to those information professionals working in the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) environment. GLAM is a cross-institutional field which seeks to find points of commonality among various cultural-heritage institutions, while still recognising their points of difference. Digitisation, collaboration and convergence are key themes and characteristics of the GLAM sector and its associated theoretical discipline. The GLAM movement has seen many institutions seeking to work together to create networks of practice that are beneficial to the cultural-heritage industry and sector. With a new Australian cultural policy imminent, it is timely to reflect on the issues and challenges that GLAM principles present to national cultural-heritage institutions by discussing their current practices. In doing so, it is possible to suggest productive ways forward for these institutions which could then be supported at a policy level by the Commonwealth government. Specifically, this paper examines four institutions: the National Gallery of Australia, the National Library of Australia, the National Archives of Australia and the National Museum of Australia. The paper reflects on their responses to the Commonwealth's 2011 Cultural Policy Discussion Paper. It argues that by encouraging and supporting collecting institutions to participate more fully in GLAM practices the Commonwealth government's cultural policy would enable far greater public access to, and participation in, Australia's cultural heritage. Furthermore, by considering these four institutions, the paper presents a discussion of the challenges and the opportunities that GLAM theoretical and disciplinary principles present to the cultural-heritage sector.

Peter J. Scott and the Australian ‘series’ system: its origins, features, rationale, impact and continuing relevance

During the 1960s Peter J. Scott and colleagues at the then Commonwealth Archives Office (now National Archives of Australia) devised a new approach to archival intellectual control which separated descriptive information about the creators of records from information about the records themselves. This approach - which became known as the ‘series’ system - has since been adopted by all public records institutions in Australia and New Zealand and by a number of other archival programmes around the world. It has also fundamentally influenced the development and evolution of international archival descriptive standards. In this article, Adrian Cunningham, Laura Millar, and Barbara Reed explore the origins, features, rationale, impact, and continuing relevance of Scott's series system.

Archival Guides and the National Archives of Australia

A series of guides published by the National Archives of Australia (NAA) is considered against the background of various definitions and examples of archival guides produced in Australia during the past sixty years. The author then discusses the range of NAA guides: in particular, its so-called research guides, including the latest, published on-line and in hard copy, which surveys Commonwealth records about the Northern Territory. The article draws comparisons with the National Library’s Trove system and ends with questions about the purpose of these guides, given the NAA’s overall strategy for public discovery and its other information retrieval and promotional tools.

Marketing Tea against a Turning Tide: Coffee and the Tea Council of Australia 1963–1974

Marketing Tea against a Turning Tide: Coffee and the Tea Council of Australia 1963–1974

Defining a business model for the digital age at the National Archives of Australia

At the 17th Congress of the International Council on Archives in Brisbane, David Fricker, the Director-General of the National Archives of Australia, spoke to the Congress theme of sustainability. In particular, his paper considered the business model of a national archive, and what reforms archives should be looking at as they operate in the digital age. This paper focuses on the basic elements of an archive's business: the records, custody, preservation, access and the legislative framework that enables all of its activities. Fricker argues that these concepts need to be re-thought as archives define their business models for a digital world. He discusses some of the ways the National Archives of Australia is responding to the challenges of the digital age. In a crowded information marketplace, he suggests that the role of archives in providing the complete, authentic record will remain crucially important.

Sisters Behind the Wire: Reappraising Australian Military Nursing and Internment in the Pacific during World War II

During the Second World War, approximately 3,500 Australian military nurses served in combat regions throughout the world. The vast majority were enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS), but after the Japanese advance and the fall of Hong Kong (December 1941) and Singapore (February 1942), a significant number of these nurses spent three-and-a-half years as POWs in Indonesia, Hong Kong, Japan and the Philippines. To date, considerable research has been undertaken on POW experiences in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand and Japan, albeit primarily focused on the testimonies of men and civilian women. This body of research utilises various methodologies, from Yuki Tanaka and Kei Ushimura's efforts to reconcile Japanese war crimes with the corruption of the Bushido ethic and sexual violence in contemporary Japanese society, to Christina Twomey's work on the imprisonment and repatriation of Dutch, Dutch–Eurasian and Australian civilian women and children. In the past fifteen years, historians have become aware of the need to recognise the multiplicity of these experiences, rather than continuing to focus on individual community, camp or regional case studies. Nurses are by no means absent from the discussion, although the majority of notable works on this subject focus on Hong Kong or the Philippines and adopt a descriptive and somewhat anecdotal approach. At the same time, scant critical attention has been paid to the internment of nurses in Indonesia despite a wealth of material kept in the Australian War Memorial (AWM) and National Archives of Australia (NAA).

Guidance for implementing globally harmonised software specifications for records

Soon after the ICA's Principles and Functional Requirements for Records in Electronic Office Environments (ICA-Req) was published in 2008, it was fast-tracked for adoption by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as a Standard. Concurrent with the fast-tracking of ICA-Req's three modules as an ISO standard, a new project known as ICA-Req Phase 2 was launched. Like the original scheme, ICA-Req Phase 2 was a multinational project funded by the ICA and led by the National Archives of Australia. Its objective is to develop guidance and training material to assist with the implementation of ICA-Req in organisations with limited resources and in developing countries.

Building a digital future: enabling the development of digital archives in Australia and New Zealand

The National Archives of Australia's digital archiving programme has been in operation since 2006. During this time, the organisation has shared with the international archival community its practical experiences, technical output and lessons learned in building and managing a digital archive. Less well known than the products and experiences (or the ‘what’) of digital archiving is the ‘how’: the circumstances and processes that enabled the development of the digital archive in the first place. These include various funding processes for public moneys and timely government initiatives supporting and promoting sustainable digital preservation. This paper looks at the circumstances surrounding the development of digital archives in five jurisdictions - the Australian Government, the New Zealand Government and the Australian State Government jurisdictions of Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales. It describes the experiences of these institutions in seeking funding, leveraging existing government strategi...

‘A worse importation than chewing gum’: American Influences on The Australian Press and Their Limits—The Australian Gallup Poll, 1941–1973

In studies of the Australian press, a wide range of American influences—on news genres, on notions of newsworthiness and presentation, and on the language in which stories are written—has been larg...

Controlling the Environment: The Australian Phytotron, the Colombo Plan, and Postcolonial Science

David P.D. Munns earned his Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University in 2003 working on a soon to be book entitled The Radio Astronomers: the history of an international scientific community. Currently an Assistant Professor at John Jay College in New York, he remains focused on issues of trans-national and interdisciplinary knowledge systems and technologies in recent history. Department of History, John Jay College, CUNY. 445 W.59th St. New York, NY. 10019. E-mail: dmunns@ jjay.cuny.edu. This work was partly supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Archives Center, North Tarrytown, NY. He would like to express his gratitude to Andrew Warwick, Abigail Woods, Nicolas Rasmussen, and Sharon Kingsland for their ideas about this project, as well as to various anonymous referees. Particular thanks to Angela Creager and Gregory Barton for their insightful readings and comments. The following abbreviations are used CIT: California Institute of Technology; CSIRO: Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation; NAA: National Archives of Australia; NLA: National Library of Australia; RAC: Rockefeller Archives Center.

Relaxed and Comfortable: The Australian Pavilion at Expo '67

Expo ’67, Montreal, was the first international exhibition Australia had attended since the 1939 New York World’s Fair. In New York, Australia promoted its export industries in timber and wool in an annex next to the British pavilion. In Montreal, Australia contributed its own major pavilion, a simple, rectangular box of glass and steel. Inside, the pavilion contained few actual exhibits. The main feature of its spacious interior was a salon-style arrangement of two hundred and forty lounge chairs created by the Australian designers Grant and Mary Featherston from an idea by the exhibit designer Robin Boyd. Visitors sat in the chairs to activate short, taped interviews with prominent Australians on aspects of Australian life and achievement, delivered though stereophonic speakers in the chairs’ headrests. Occasional tables stood nearby, bearing books on Australian society and ashtrays of a modern Australian design. One wall of the main exhibition hall featured a row of modernist paintings by leading Australian artists. Natural light streamed into the pavilion through its glazed north and south faces, which provided sweeping views across the exhibition site. Quality Australian wool carpet covered the pavilion’s floors and some internal walls, muffling incoming noise and adding to the general feeling of repose. Aspects of the pavilion’s interior suggest a range of architectural types: a hotel lobby, a corporate foyer, a gallery of modern art, and the living room of a large, modern home. The priority of modern design over specific symbols of Australian nationhood was unprecedented, its origin was in the government’s newfound eagerness to stress Australia’s modernization. Such progress was emphasized in Prime Minister Harold Holt’s four-minute interview on industrialization as a significant but little known feature of contemporary Australia. When questioned on the scale of Australian manufacturing in comparison to its more familiar rural sector, Holt described employment in industry as roughly equivalent to the USA, and higher than other recognized industrial nations such as Canada, France, and Japan.1 He identified Australia’s automobile, electrical, engineering, petroleum, mining, and steel industries as all experiencing rapid growth since 1939, and being “much more advanced and sophisticated than most people would realize.”2 The Prime Minister highlighted Australian inventions such as transistorized aviation beacons, radio telephone equipment, a 1 “Expo 67 Sound Chair Scripts. Notes for Interview with Prime Minister—Final Reading Text,” undated, National Archives of Australia (NAA): A463/1966/2141: 1. 2 Ibid., 3. © 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Digital Curation/Digital Archiving: A View from the National Archives of Australia

This paper considers similarities and differences among the concepts of digital curation, digital archives, and digital libraries. It argues that, from a recordkeeping perspective, the phrase digital archive has been misused, even hijacked, and that this misuse obscures fundamental issues associated with the capture and long-term management of archival resources. The paper also argues that digital archiving requires active archival intervention across the entire records continuum, and that, as such, the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model is deficient because it ignores the need for pre-ingest archival activity. The paper reviews the digital archiving experiences of the National Archives of Australia (NAA), in light of the key messages outlined in the first half of the paper placing those endeavors in the broader Australasian context. These experiences include the NAA's efforts to promote and facilitate improvements in government recordkeeping, the NAA's digital preservation project, a...

Britain, the Old Commonwealth and the Problem of Rhodesian Independence, 1964–65

This article uses new sources from the National Archives of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom to examine the consultation and cooperation between Britain and the Old Commonwealth in dealing with the problem of Rhodesian independence. It demonstrates that Canada developed a proactive approach towards the Rhodesian problem but Britain, Australia and New Zealand gave only limited encouragement to Canadian initiatives to avert Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI). This article also argues that problems in British policy formulation – especially the weakness of its attempts to deter Rhodesia from unilateral action and its hesitant contingency planning for a UDI – strained the relationship with its Old Commonwealth partners. This is significant because it belies the impression that the problem of Rhodesian independence divided the Commonwealth simply along racial lines.

Arrangement and description of a Japanese business collection held at the National Archives of Australia

Arrangement and description of a Japanese business collection held at the National Archives of Australia

“I Cannot Find a Corner in the World Where I am Welcome”1: The Australian Wartime Experience of the Weintraub Syncopators

Immigration stories tend to favor happy endings, but the Australian wartime experience of the members of the “nut” jazz band known as the Weintraub Syncopators offers a different model. Exiled from their homeland and disbarred from employment by the anti-Semitic ideologies of the Third Reich, the musicians arrived in Sydney as internationally acclaimed celebrities in July 1937. However, soon after the declaration of World War II in September 1939, the group was collectively denounced as having been engaged in espionage on behalf of the German government while touring in Russia in 1936. These allegations were never substantiated, but they synchronized with a deep national anxiety over Fifth Column activities among German-speaking “Jewish refugees” that followed on the Nazi conquest of Europe in the early months of 1940. Interned, ostracized within the profession, and stigmatized within the society at large, individual members of the Weintraub Syncopators found themselves variously at odds with prevailing ideologies of employment and political allegiance. The collective self-representation of the group was dismantled and loyalties were fractured, and while some individual members survived into successful post-war careers in music or business, others fell into obscurity. Using government records preserved in the National Archives of Australia, this article traces the wartime experience of individual members of the group, analyzing pivotal events in the biographical narrative to show how their social and personal identities were reconfigured.

Facing the Inevitable: Britain's Entry into the European Community and Australia's Policy, 1970‐72

While Australia's response to Britain's 1961‐63 bid to join the European Community has been examined in almost every possible detail, Australian policy towards Britain's 1970‐72 application has drawn very little scholarly attention. This article therefore aims to fill this gap by drawing on newly released archival material from the National Archives of Australia in Canberra and the National Archives in London. In doing so, the article examines the impact of Britain's 1971‐72 application to join the EC on Australian policy and the Anglo‐Australian relations. It argues that while far from provoking the same widespread uproar as the Macmillan government's original application in 1961, Britain's final bid had important political and economic implications for Australian foreign policy.

Australia in Focus: Photographs in the National Archives A Nation's Imagination: Australia's Copyright Records, 1854-1968

Australian Economic History ReviewVolume 46, Issue 1 p. 98-99 Australia in Focus: Photographs in the National Archives A Nation's Imagination: Australia's Copyright Records, 1854–1968 First published: 08 March 2006 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8446.2006.00155.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Abstract Book reviewed Peter Nagle, Australia in Focus: Photographs in the National Archives. Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 2003. Pp. 251. ISBN: 0642344957. Paperback $10.00. Merilyn Minell, A Nation's Imagination: Australia's Copyright Records, 1854–1968. Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 2003. Pp. 147. ISBN: 0642344930. Paperback $10.00. Reviewed by Jane EllenUniversity of Melbourne Archives Volume46, Issue1March 2006Pages 98-99 RelatedInformation

Immigration Department Library Saved

In July 2003 the long-serving Librarian of the Department of Immigration returned from leave to find 70% of her treasured library – the most valuable collection of material relating to the history of immigration, migrant settlement and multiculturalism in Australia – had been culled. All material published before 1995 had been removed regardless of its historical significance. The Department proposed to send the collection to Lifeline. Presumably what it could not sell would end up at the dump. She managed to persuade the Department to offer the collection to libraries or museums in Sydney, Melbourne or Adelaide: a solution which would save some of it, but destroy its integrity as a collection. I was very familiar with this collection. Like many of my fellow officers I frequently consulted it in the course of preparing Departmental briefs and papers. It was also invaluable as a supplement to the Departmental archives I had used in preparing my books, Alien to Citizen and Redefining Australians, on the development of the Department’s settlement policies from 1945–75. Its photographic collection, which dated from the days of the Department of Information and from which I drew most of the books’ illustrations, is now preserved in the National Archives of Australia. In my capacity as a member of the Australian Historical Association’s Libraries and Archives Users Committee, I appealed to the Chief Minister of the ACT, Jon Stanhope, asking him to retain this important national collection intact and in the national capital, arguing that it would be a valuable component of his proposed Multicultural Centre. My letter was endorsed and enthusiastically promoted by the then President of the AHA, David Carment. It was also supported by representatives of the Migrant Resource Centre of Canberra and Queanbeyan, the ACT Multicultural Council and Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Council of Australia, a number of Australian Vice Chancellors and Deans of relevant faculties, the former Minister for Immigration, Al Grassby, the Canberra and District Historical Society, Manning Clark House, the Australian Institute of Jesuit Studies, the Refugee Council of Australia, the Independent Scholars Association, the Australian Catholic Migrant and Refugee Office and Racial Respect, as well as Charles Price, James Jupp and Jerzy Zubrycki: scholars who have made immigration their life’s work. I am delighted to be able to announce that the ACT government agreed to accept the collection, and it has already been installed on the shelves of the new Theo Notaris Multicultural Centre awaiting cataloguing. It is a research facility with internet access, not a library. It is open to researchers at any time during working hours, and in a few months it will be accessible through the on-line catalogue of the ACT Library Service whose City library will be soon co-located with it. The Multicultural Centre is located on Level 2 of the North Building, 180 London Circuit, above the Canberra Museum and Gallery. For more information consult the Centre’s Manager, George Simpson: phone 02 6205 3297, or email george.simpson@act.gov.au.

Some Functions are More Equal than Others: The Development of a Macroappraisal Strategy for the National Archives of Australia

In 1999–2000 the National Archives of Australia (NAA) adopted a functions-based approach to appraisal. Since that time functional appraisal projects have for the most part been conducted in cooperation with individual agencies. What has been missing is a broad whole-of-government or macroappraisal framework which might assist with the strategic prioritisation of projects, the allocation of resources and the identification of high-value functions, activities and record classes. This article describes a project commenced by the NAA during 2003–2004 to research and develop a functions-based macroappraisal framework for current and prospective appraisal and for retrospective application to records of the past 30 years of the Australian Government. The article compares the Australian approach with macroappraisal strategies pursued in Canada, the Netherlands and South Africa.