Michael Jones

• University of Melbourne

In 2017 archaeological evidence was published which indicates that modern humans first arrived in Australia around 65,000 years ago. Through the countless generations since, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples built deep connections to the landscape, developed rich material culture infused with story and myth, and used oral and ceremonial...

The idea that knowledge relies on interconnection is not new. However, despite the impact of technology, splits remain within and between museum collections. A range of factors have contributed to this, including legacy practice, the early tenets of the ‘museum archives movement,’ the professionalization of archivists and the continued focus on obj...

Large museums contain diverse collections, often including specimens, artefacts, archives, and publications. At the intersection of many of these are natural history field books, which are regularly treated as both museum objects and archival items, as scientific data and historical narratives, and as personal artefacts, organizational records and...

Purpose This paper aims to advocate that significant human and systems-based capabilities (termed “socio-technical capabilities”) need to be developed in government departments and other public sector organisations to support more effective description of information resources, collections and their context in online environments. Design/methodol...

Unlike many archival organisations, the University of Melbourne’s eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC) is not a custodial repository or a teaching facility. This allows the centre to collaborate with a wide range of organisations and individuals, bringing archival thinking and practice to a variety of sectors, many of which are not traditionally ass...

The eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC) has produced EAC-CPF XML outputs from web resources for many years. Using the Find & Connect web resource project as a case study, this article explores the uses that the ESRC has developed for EAC-CPF data, including online presentation of descriptive contextual information, as the basis of online search ser...

Archival records are of tremendous value to care leavers; however, this community faces many barriers when attempting to access records about their time in institutions as children. This article explores the particular needs of care leaver communities in Australia and discusses a digital resource (www.findandconnect.gov.au) designed to improve acce...

As a post-custodial research archivist I have worked in many contexts, from projects involving major archival institutions, governments and universities through to advising and training people working at the other end of the scale, in small archives, single room collections and inadequately resourced community or religious organisations. Similarly,...

Public institutions involved in research that aims to strengthen the productivity, profitability and adaptiveness of industries face a multiplicity of challenges when managing for the emergence of cost effective solutions to problems. We reflect upon the learnings of a Government sponsored Visiting Fellow’s programme that we describe as a knowledge...

There is a need for systemic improvement in the management of care records in Australia. This has been highlighted by government inquiries, media coverage and research literature relating to the significance of records for those who experience out-of-home care. The Who Am I? project – an interdisciplinary collaboration between historians, social wo...

In this paper, we discuss the idea of resilient knowledge and how the concept of knowledge-based development might be conceived as scientific discipline, and on what basis. Discussion is presented in two sections. In the first section we explore the idea of the epistemic loss of knowledge. We suggest this type of knowledge loss occurs where there i...