Naming the unnamed, speaking the unspoken, depicting the undepicted: The Australian Women's Register story

Ensuring evidence of women’s experiences and
contributions to our world are kept for the public
record and adequately represented in memory
institutions has been a key challenge for many
inside and outside of the academy over the last
half century. This material is vital in order to
continue the work of retrieving women’s history
from ‘the shrouds of silence and obscurity’ and
‘fill in the blank half of a huge canvas’.
1
Over the past decade, the Australian Women’s
Archives Project (AWAP) has been developing
the Australian Women's Register (
http://ww
w.womenaustralia.info/
) as a central part of
its strategy to encourage the preservation of
women’s archival heritage and to make it more
accessible to researchers. The Register is a
specialist central access point to information
about Australian women and their achievements
and the multifarious resources in which varying
aspects of their lives are documented. It provides
a gateway to archival and published material
relating to women held in Australian cultural
institutions as well as in private hands. A series
of small and large grants have contributed
to the development of the content of the
Register and the technology in which it is
captured, managed and made available to as
wide an audience as possible via the Web. The
National Foundation for Australian Women,
2
the community organisation behind the AWAP,
plays a significant role in securing project
funding, along with driving innovation in its
coverage and content.
The latest of these grants, an Australian
Research Council Linkage Infrastructure
Equipment and Facilities Grant (ARC LIEF)
awarded in 2008, allowed the exploration of
the Register as part of a federated information
architecture to support historical scholarship
in digital and networked environments. It
involved the investigation of community based
methods for populating the Register, as well
as enabling the harvesting of its content into
emerging national discovery services. With the
National Library of Australia (NLA) as a key
industry partner, a mechanism for harvesting
Encoded Archival Context (EAC)
3
records from
the Register was established for incorporation
into their exciting new
Trove
discovery service,
4
using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for
Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).
5
The federated information architecture which
such harvesting services make possible is aimed
at increasing the productivity of all those
associated with the creation, management and
use of source material for historical research. As
well as fostering the development of complicit
systems, it is also about allowing a rich
multiplicity and variety of voices to contribute
their knowledge to resource discovery systems.
It involves scholars' direct participation in
resource description frameworks allowing their
extensive, intimate and fine grained knowledge
of sources and their relationships to areas of
study to become part of networked information
infrastructure. It also aims to provide a
mechanism by which the flow of information
about resources in and out of cultural
institutions is improved, allowing researchers
to discover, explore and make connections
between materials held in disparate locations
efficiently and effectively, and in turn to feed
that knowledge back into the network.
As a pioneering e-Research initiative, the
story of AWAP and the
Australian Women’s
Register (AWR)
offers much insight into the
establishment, evolution and sustainability of
advanced scholarly information infrastructure
to facilitate information intensive collaborative
research in the humanities.
6
It is illustrative
of how digital and networking technologies
change the roles and relationships of scholars,

2
information professionals, universities and the
wider community in order to build greater
capabilities, connectedness, robustness and
resilience into historical/archival/humanities
information systems. Above all it asserts the
value of scholarly principles, re-visioned, re-
imagined and re-distributed for the digital and
networked age, and it places women’s history
firmly in the mainstream rather than being
consigned to the margins. What began ten years
ago as a small, community initiative aimed
at securing the uncertain future of women’s
archival records has developed into a project
of national significance. The fact that it is
a feminist project is entirely relevant to the
story as well, given the distributed and partial
nature of women’s archival collections and the
historical circumstances of their production.
This paper will outline and review the
development of the
Australian Women’s
Register
, by discussing the problem of female
under-representation in the archival record,
explaining the implications of this for historical
researchers and describing how the AWR works
to harness information about existing records
while it creates a new ‘community’ archive in
cyberspace. There will be an emphasis on how it
has and has not been able to address emerging
requirements for e-Humanities infrastructure
as articulated in reports such as
Our Cultural
Commonwealth
; however, the focus will be on
explaining how the successful development of
any e-Humanities infrastructure is shaped by
the strength of the collaboration between users
and developers.
7
It will discuss the content
and technological developments undertaken as
part of the ARC LIEF project, and reflect on
the readiness of various stakeholders of the
Register to take advantage of these capabilities
and participate in the design and development
of future ones.
Notes
1.
The title of this paper owes much to the wonderful words
of Australia’s first female Governor General, Quentin Bryce,
when re-launching the
Australian Women’s Register
on the
13 October 2009. In her speech she highlighted the words
of Adrienne Rich, American poet and feminist, ‘Whatever
is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted
from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever
is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by,
whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning
under an inadequate or lying language – this will become,
not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.’ See
http://www.g
g.gov.au/governorgeneral/speech.php?id=625
. The
wordes in quotes come from the same source.
2.
Information about the aims of the National Foundation for
Australian Women can be found at
http://www.nfaw.org/
.
3.
Encoded Archival Context – Corporate bodies, Persons, and
Families (EAC-CPF) is a metadata standard for the description
of individuals, families and corporate bodies which create,
preserve, use, are responsible for, or are otherwise associated
with records. Its purpose is to standardize the encoding of
descriptions of agents and their relationships to resources and
to one another, to enable the sharing, discovery and display of
this information. See
http://eac.staatsbibliothek-be
rlin.de/
4.
Trove
is the National Library of Australia’s new discovery
service, providing a single point of access to resources held
in Australia’s memory institutions and incorporating rich
contextual metadata from a variety of sources. See
http://t
rove.nla.gov.au/
.
5.
OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a
lightweight harvesting protocol for sharing metadata between
services developed by the Open Archives Initiative. It defines a
mechanism for harvesting metadata records from repositories
based on the open standards HTTP (Hypertext Transport
Protocol) and XML (Extensible Markup Language) in support
of new patterns for scholarly communication. See
http://ww
w.openarchives.org/pmh/
.
6.
Christine Borgman,
Scholarship in the Digital Age:
Information, Infrastructure and the Internet
, MIT Press,
Cambridge Massachusetts, 2007.
7.
American Council of Learned Societies,
Our Cultural
Commonwealth: The Final Report of the American Council
of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for
the Humanities & Social Sciences
, 13 December 2006, 43
pp,
http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/Our
CulturalCommonwealth.pdf
.