Australian Society of Archivists conference 2018

The ASA's annual conference (September 25–28 at the Perth casino) was incredibly interesting; I feel like I should have gone years ago. I was there as a Wikimedia Australia representative, and we had a table alongside the NAA, Trove, Ancestry, etc. in the central mingling space. We spoke to lots of archivists about Wikimedia and what things we hold in common… and mostly there was not too much arguing about copyright.

There were some people from smaller archives, especially regional ones, who seemed very keen to learn more about how they could get records and representations of their material into Wikimedia. I think this is could be a very fruitful avenue — showing the smaller institutions that they don't need to run their own cloud infrastructure, but can get on board with the open, secure, long-term, and collaborative world.

I learnt lots about the Australian series system, especially around things like how to keep original order alongside artificial 'series' and the usefulness of linking items within series to multiple (context) entities. Also that custody and location metadata should live outside this hierarchy.

Lots of talk about particular software systems and how to manage them. Seems to be a common idea that whatever database is used, it'll be swapped out in 5–7 years! Which feels like a shame to me.

An interesting template spreadsheet was handed out, Bootstrapping Small Archives - Series System Template v1.ods (unfortunately I can't republish it here; ask Piers Higgs for a copy maybe).

Some mentions of open source (esp. AtoM), and a good lot about what was going to be the upcoming 'Collections Australia', based on Victorian Collections system — but this is now canned and to be replaced by a new system being built by the WA Museum on top of their existing Drupal stack. I must say I feel pretty disappointed at this! The whole idea of software like this should be that it can be deployed (and, crucially, developed) by multiple users, but here it sounds like it's just a political idea that somehow came to the conclusion that the different sides of Australia have irreconcilable differences in how they need to manage small institutional archives! Oh well.

The final keynote of the conference was delivered by Andy Mabbett, a Wikimedian that WMAU brought over from the UK for a (2nd) Wikidata tour. He's quite inspiring.

The following day, we held two workshops at Flux in St Georges Terrace, focussing on Wikidata and hands-on editing skills. I think people learnt some things, and I certainly enjoyed learning from Andy different ways to present this sort of information.