APSIG newsletter no. 61: July 2006

ASAA 2006: Asia reconstructed

The biennial ASAA Conference, this year held from 26-29 June on the attractive University of Wollongong campus tacked a number of engaging and relevant themes for Asian studies in Australia today. Several keynote sessions questioned the role and future of Asian studies, and invited speakers from a range of disciplines outside Asian studies had fresh and interesting insights on some often discussed issues, such as falling enrolments in universities, the dumbing down of the curriculum and the changing nature of the job market for Asian studies graduates.

Registrations for the conference were down on the 2004 Conference, with approximately 250 delegates, but there was no shortage of parallel sessions, with as many as twelve different sessions to choose from on some days.

Two very successful library-related sessions drew good audiences during the conference. In this issue of the APSIG Newsletter we report on the first, with the second one to follow in our next issue.

'Managing digital materials in the research environment, or, what to do when your PDFs are obsolete', organised by the National Library, had an interested audience of academics and the few librarians who were attending the conference. Speakers Kevin Bradley of the National Library, Helen Mandl of Wollongong University Library, Darrell Dorrington of the ANU Library and Adrian Burton of the APSR Project (Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories) gave a series of informative and well-considered papers on the subject of digital obsolescence, changing technologies and institutional solutions.

Kevin Bradley highlighted in layman's terms why academics and librarians need to think about preserving documents in digital form. Several things can happen to digital information: the physical technology will change (such as the hardware to run floppy disks); the format will become obsolete, such as PDFs; and lastly, backup is not preservation - it keeps parts of the document but won't preserve access. The PDF format, for example, depends on other bits of software like fonts to display correctly. Copying to a CD, said Kevin, is not a preservation strategy.

Helen Mandl gave an informative overview of a number of multimillion dollar projects currently running in Australia to develop the technologies needed for large-scale digital repositories. She noted that so far the repository projects were focused on research data in the hard sciences. There was a need to raise awareness amongst practitioners of the role of research repositories in the social sciences and humanities and start working to identify valuable research collections, including for Asian studies. In particular, said Helen, the smaller less well-resourced universities needed to become involved.

Adrian Burton of the APSR Project (Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories) drew together the themes of both Kevin and Helen's papers in presenting the activities of the APSR Project, which was established to work with partner institutions to develop the technology for the management of large quantities of digital data collections. He noted that academics are best placed to know what is significant about collections.

Darrell Dorrington of the ANU Asia-Pacific Division highlighted a number of ANU's Asian digitisation projects - the Chinese Digital Archive, the Giles-Pickford collection of photographs of China 1860-1950, and an album of photographs of a tiger shoot in Nepal, 1911. All were available on the ANU Library website and were also archived in the ANU digital repository.



Amelia McKenzie