Trusr and technology

Trust and Technology

Indigenous Australians’ lives began to change nearly 220 years ago with the establishment of the first of six British colonies in Sydney in 1788. The contrast between the two cultures could not have been stronger. Whole clans and nations were dispersed, killed, moved to reserves and made the objects of misguided assimilation, conversion and welfare including the separation of children from their families. While attempts have now been made at reconciliation and fostering self-determination, one legacy of dispossession, exploitation and paternalism was, and remains, a distrust of white institutions, including religious, legal and government institutions. This inevitably extended to archival institutions and to the content of the files they and government agencies held.

The Trust and Technology project,4 begun in 2004 at Monash University, Melbourne with Australian Research Council funding, aimed:

1.

to develop a way of preserving through recording orally transmitted indigenous knowledge, and controlling access to it; and

2.

to develop specifications for an annotation system which would allow today’s Indigenous Australians to ‘answer back’, that is to respond to institutional archives by creating websites of collections comprising comments, digitised documents and even lists of other relevant collections.

Needless to say the research and development is entirely predicated on consultation, the project partners including a strong representation of indigenous organisations and others.5 The project is half completed and is currently assessing results and planning the scope and funding to develop the specification for the second objective. Already, however, several features are noteworthy from an appraisal viewpoint.

The first is the direct involvement of communities in the formation of collections and control of access to them. The system contemplated by the Trust and Technology project involves Indigenous Australian communities lodging their own records in their own virtual archives, the appraisal choices being shaped by the contested records about them in government archives and to which they claim, morally, a shared ownership.

The second feature concerns the question: what is to be appraised? Traditional appraisal assumes records exist, the primary aim being to determine their length of retention. By contrast, many Australian archivists assume that business functions and activities exist, the primary aim being to determine which should be evidenced through records captured in recordkeeping systems.6 Now the Monash project is pushing the threshold question even further back by assuming indigenous memory exists embedded in word, song, music, dance and ritual. Starting with storytelling, it is saying in effect that one aim of appraisal is to provide the means for indigenous people themselves to select and appropriately preserve them as records.

Technology Google Chrome Socialno mreženje Voice Assistance Devices Virtualni svetovi

ID projekta: #33874204

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