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Koorie Community Archives Project

A. Prof. Graeme Johanson, Caulfield School of Information Technology.

The project will build on existing work undertaken by staff from COSI (Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics) and Monash University, in particular three Content and Rights work packages of the Dataset Acquisition, Accessibility, and Annotations e-Research Technologies (DART) project, and the ARC ‘Trust and Technology’ Project, Project ID LP0348953 (2004-6), which raised important questions about who controls community e-Research repositories. Questions raised by these precursors were outside of the scope of those projects and so were not explored in depth, but they were nevertheless adumbrated as worthy of serious attention. This project deliberately focuses on a challenging area of participatory e-Research in order to bring out the widest possible range of issues. It is designed to explore issues relating to governance frameworks that can be applied in new e-Community contexts, and to identify the user needs of e-Researchers, funding providers, their collaborators, industry partners, community partners, and e-Research consumers. It forms part of a new paradigm, which stresses the importance of facilitating participation, by addressing issues which arise about the new management principles required for the authenticity, accessibility, disposition and preservation of electronic resources for multiple purposes. Specifically, this project is intended to:

  • Analyse the current situation by o examining user needs, governance guidelines and rules with particular reference to participatory e-Research, thus enhancing existing repository initiatives and undertake a user needs analysis of all stakeholders in a specific e-Research project, and
  • Critique existing policies by use of a case study of a multidisciplinary project drawing on the areas of History, Law, Archival Science and Information Systems.

The specific case study to be used is the Koorie Community Archives Project, a participatory research project designed to address the shortcomings of current models of government archives in relation to the control and accessibility of records relating to Indigenous people, in the context of broader frameworks, including human rights, redress and reconciliation agendas.