20-3-2014
One of my father’s many objectives in starting this blog was for it to become something of a historical resource to future researchers attempting to make sense of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and related matters. That desire influenced his research efforts and helped motivate him to write as carefully and as often as he did.
It is a source of great frustration to me that I have dropped the ball in the sense that I have not been posting daily or even weekly on coverage of the very important things that have been happening at the Royal Commission and elsewhere, not least of which have been the Parramatta/Hay hearings and the Ellis Defence hearings.
These will have to be covered retrospectively when I have the opportunity to do so. My current difficulties in life and my necessary preoccupation with matters such as the upcoming Case Study 10 hearings into the Salvation Army have had to take precedence.
Nevertheless, I am heartened by a recent decision of the National Library of Australia to digitally archive this blog in a project called the PANDORA archive.
This archive is described as follows:
“PANDORA, Australia's Web Archive, is a growing collection of Australian online publications, established initially by the National Library of Australia in 1996, and now built in collaboration with nine other Australian libraries and cultural collecting organisations.”
“The name, PANDORA, is an acronym that encapsulates our mission: Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia.”
“The PANDORA Archive is a selective collection of web publications and websites relating to Australia and Australians. It includes materials that document the cultural, social, political life and activities of the Australian community and intellectual and expressive activities of Australians.”
“PANDORA is a selective archive. The National Library and its partners do not attempt to collect all Australian online publications and web sites, but select those that they consider are of significance and to have long-term research value.”
“The full text of archived content in indexed and selected titles are catalogued and included in the National Bibliographic Database. Both the full-text index and catalogue records are searchable through the Library's national single search discover service (Trove).
“The PANDORA collection can be browsed through subject and alphabetical listings on the PANDORA Home Page.”
The National Library of Australia has informed me that by including www.lewisblayse.net in the PANDORA archive:
“The Library will catalogue your publications and add the records to the National Bibliographic Database (a database of catalogue records shared by over 5,200 Australian libraries), as well as to our own online catalogue. This will increase awareness of your publications among researchers using libraries.”
Furthermore, the archiving will occur periodically, meaning that as more is added to the site, that too will be archived. As the National Library of Australia has said to me:
“We would like to re-archive your publication periodically to record significant additions and changes.”The person who made this possible and who actually made the approach to the National Library of Australia (I didn’t even know about PANDORA) has indicated a preference to remain anonymous, but I would like to quote something of what she said to the National Library of Australia when she approached them with a request for the site to be incorporated into the PANDORA archive. She said:
“I consider the work of Mr Lewis Blayse in his blog to be a body of work of national importance at this time in our history, it’s living history with a superb future historical research capacity.”
I’ve thanked this person privately, but thank her again here. My father would have been very pleased at this development given his original objective with the blog.
I also extend my thanks to the National Library of Australia, and Russell Latham at the library, for making the decision to archive the blog.
Aletha Blayse
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