‘Improving access to Indigenous collections at the State Library of
South Australia’
Suzy Russell and Denise Chapman
Collection Specialists
State Library of South Australia
Paper presented to the ATSILIRN Conference ‘Listen up! Speak up!
Charles Darwin University
Darwin, April 8-9, 2008
Introduction
Hello, I’m Suzy Russell and I’m talking today with my colleague Denise Chapman.
Denise and I work at the State Library of South Australia as Indigenous Collection Specialists.
We commenced these positions in 2003, and for each of us this is our first role working with
Indigenous collections.
Coming to conferences such as this one are an integral part of our learning process.
As a relatively small-scale operation we look to other projects and institutions to provide us
with inspiration, and we thank you all for having done so thus far.
Some of the activities we carry out as Collection Specialists include:
 Answering research queries that require an in-depth knowledge of the Library’s Indigenous
collections
 Delivering in-house staff training and advice
 Creating and having input into policies and procedures
 Supplying content for State Library exhibitions, websites and factsheets – and, to Aboriginal
communities and Knowledge Centres when approached. (We are currently doing this in a
‘reactive’ way, but we hope to be more proactive in this area in the near future, as we will
discuss further in the paper.)
In all of these duties our goal is to make Indigenous collections and resources more available with the aim of striking a balance between increasing accessibility and respecting
Indigenous culture and protocols.
Today we are going to talk about a new role that we have embraced in recent times - one that
plays an important, sometimes forgotten role in managing access to Indigenous collections that of cataloguing, collection description and processing.
Later I will be discussing my recent projects to add and improve bibliographic records on the
State Library catalogue and Libraries Australia. But first Denise will talk about her adventures
processing the Library’s largest ethnographic archival collection, the Mountford-Sheard
collection, and the planning of its digitisation.
The Mountford-Sheard collection
This collection, which spans over 120 shelf metres, includes items of great cultural
significance to many Aboriginal communities, most notably those in Central Australia,
Arnhem Land, the Tiwi Islands and the northern Flinders Ranges of South Australia.
In recognition of this significance, the collection has recently been inscribed on the UNESCO
Australian Memory of the World Register.
The Mountford-Sheard collection holds a wealth of material gathered by self-taught South
Australian ethnographer CP Mountford during a career spanning the 1930s to the 1960s.
Included are field notebooks and journals, photographic images, motion pictures, sound
recordings, artworks, correspondence and published works.
By recording and photographing people, places and stories in meticulous detail, Mountford
created a rich resource of cultural, spiritual and historical information that is important to
both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians and is still highly sought after.
During the late 1940s, Mountford’s friend Harold Sheard began assembling Mountford’s
private archive of expedition records, published works, and pictorial material. The collection
was donated to the Library by Mountford and Sheard in 1957 (hence the name MountfordSheard), and was supplemented by a further collection of materials from Mountford in 1970.
Mountford’s pre-eminent interest was in the artistic, ceremonial and religious aspects of
Aboriginal culture. Advice and consultation to date has demonstrated that the level of
secret/sacred content within the collection is substantial.
Denise is now going to speak about the Library’s approach to making this important collection
more accessible, whilst safeguarding the many parts that are culturally restricted, and her
major role in this endeavour.
Creating finding aids and processing the Mountford-Sheard collection
In the 50 or so years since the library first acquired the Mountford-Sheard collection,
curatorial staff developed what finding aids they could using the technology and resources
available to them. Often the curators were very long term, and built up an individual
knowledge of the holdings that was not recorded sufficiently or transferred over to others
when they left.
The original collection included a set of very idiosyncratic index cards, a sample of which is
indicated in the figure below, plus scant indexes to the huge collection of photographs.
The curator previous to Suzy and I had started work rearranging the collection into a formatbased sequence, and began creating an intranet site to record the details. The items were
arranged in groups of journals, photograph albums, recordings etc., however they didn’t
necessarily relate to one expedition, activity or group of people.
As there was no handover from the previous curator when we started, we had to build our
knowledge from scratch. One of the first things we realised about working with the Mountford
collection was that research requests were often for images, and without comprehensive
finding aids, fulfilling these requests was very time-consuming and daunting. (As an example,
the three cards on the left of the above figure actually represent many thousands of significant
black and white photographs and coloured slides.)
We recognised the need to create a useful, searchable finding-aid for these photographs and
over 2-3 years, indexed about 12,000 images to a database, with the help of carefully selected
volunteers and field-work students. This project was mutually beneficial as the students were
able to gain hands-on experience with a rare and significant collection, and practise principles
in the handling of Indigenous content. The resultant database reduces hours of work and
frustration down to a few minutes, and increases accessibility to a broader range of material
due to the coverage that can be achieved with different searching capabilities.
We then decided to rearrange, and begin processing the rest of the Mountford papers, to and
give a logical flow to the material and reflect correct Archival practice. As mentioned above,
the collection measures over 120 shelf metres, in various formats, and approximately 85
possible subject-based series have been identified. The series are mostly topical, whereby the
material is grouped by, for example, all the items collected during, or relevant to, a specific
expedition. As this is often what people ask to see, it made sense to have all of this material
together. Other logical groupings include scientific papers, correspondence, and preparation
for publications. I might add here that our motto for the Mountford collection is ‘the man
threw nothing away, and he copied it twice!’ which is probably just as well given the
significance of the collection.
We describe the collection onto the commonly available Library Database, using archival
standards and fields. We do this to ensure the records are universally available, and are
maintained and upgraded into the future. It’s better to do this and have ICT support, than to
create your own lists and risk the data becoming corrupt or the software becoming obsolete,
as has happened in the past.
The processing work is guided by the ‘Aboriginal Special Holdings Project’ report which
specialist contractors, Ron Lister and the late Ushma Scales, prepared when they assessed our
ethnographic collections. Ron and Ushma worked for about 12 months identifying and
separating restricted, sensitive and open material, as well as facilitating and informing our
digitisation plans, and providing in-house cultural awareness training to library staff.
I would like to mention here that the guidance and friendship offered by Ron and Ushma was
very generous, and I found this to be one of the most rewarding times in my working life.
I have indeed had quite a few adventures while processing this material. I have made
discoveries, dispelled a few myths, had some of my preconceived ideas challenged, and found
out incredible facts - such as Mountford having to develop his film in a cup and wash it in a
creek during the 1952 Yirrkala expedition!
I’ve also found some funny and startling things which aren’t fit for polite company but
certainly add context to the overall body of work! These so-called ‘adventures’ or
serendipitous finds are actually useful to our methods of processing as they help to separate
fact from fiction, and help me put the puzzle together properly. So, in addition to basic
bibliographic data, we record notes on these ‘discoveries’ if relevant, plus information about
access and copying restrictions, community contacts, related publications, a history for each
main expedition, and appropriate subject-headings.
The philosophy behind this level of detail is to give the material context and to take the fear
out of managing the collection, by providing as much supporting information as possible to
library staff and users. I guess this could be termed ‘Knowledge Management’, but to me it’s
common sense and prepares for the future when other people might be managing access to
the collection.
The processing is also part of the workflow of providing file names for our digitisation project,
which I will come to shortly.
To date, I have processed 25 series (or about one-third) of the collection.
The processing of course has its challenges. It’s a very large collection, which will probably
take years to process, so I sometimes get ‘large record group processing fatigue’. We manage
this by mixing things up a bit, and tackling something smaller that can be completed quickly,
in amongst the bigger and more difficult material. I do see light at the end of the tunnel, but
it’s a bit like planting a pine tree seedling – you might not be there to see the grown-up tree
but you’re doing something good in the meantime!
Other challenges would be familiar to all of you: time constraints, conflicting priorities and
organisational change.
Besides simply having the material described, there are many other positive outcomes of this
project.
Through rearranging and processing the material our knowledge of the collection has
increased significantly, to the point where I find myself quoting facts and figures that I didn’t
even know I knew. This translates into better assistance for researchers and communities, as
we can direct people to more relevant material, much more quickly.
We are more confident in knowing what is restricted or sensitive, and in administering that
when responding to requests. Many people think, for example, that the restrictions don’t
apply to them, and we try and use these situations as an opportunity to educate, using advice,
resource description, and the Protocols to show consistency in our approach.
Another advantage is that we can better demonstrate to communities exactly how we manage
access requests. For example when Ushma brought the Uluru men to the Library to view
material relevant to their country, we all sat and talked about managing restricted material
and how we make sure only the right people see it. i.e. them. It turned out to be quite a social
event, and resulted in a project of digital repatriation of over 1300 Mountford slides and
photographs, now used by the Uluru men in the management of their rock art.
Kunmanara ‘Reggie’
Uluru, one of the
Traditional Owners of
Uluru, views materials
during a visit to the
State Library of South
Australia, 2006.
Photograph courtesy
Ron Lister
Also, we can now provide educated advice to other Library departments on matters of policy
development, secure housing and digitisation priorities.
For me, I have learnt new skills in archival practice and processing, which, although more
about principles than rules, has a flexibility of description which I enjoy and find logical, and I
hope others find useful.
Digitising the Mountford Collection
Our project to digitise the collection began in March 2007, with a view to protecting originals,
providing easier access and ultimately, digital repatriation to communities.
As mentioned earlier, our digitisation work is assisted and informed by the ‘Aboriginal Special
Holdings Project’. Through the project’s contact with active community groups, information
was gathered to inform the digitisation process, and the resultant community interest in our
projects provided a structure for prioritising.
In setting priorities we reviewed past access requests and community interest.
Important factors for consideration were:
 Exposure due to high demand
 Native Title requirements
 Uniqueness and rarity (e.g. description of the last traditional ceremony held in a
community)
 Community demand and digital repatriation possibilities
 Historical importance of the expedition (e.g. 1948 Arnhem Land expedition)
 Demand by aligned institutions
Digitisation activity and electronic file management
So here we come to the actual process of digitisation, and contracting in appropriate
personnel.
Our contractor, Garry Benson, came to us through the Ara Irititja archive project, and is
cleared by communities to do this work. Fortunately for us, Garry works fast, the results are
excellent, and we enjoy working with him. Of course Garry can’t scan material pertinent to
women; however he has helped identify and provided training to women who can.
Contractor Garry Benson at work digitising the Mountford-Sheard collection, Feb 2007
We used the Protocols, advice from Ara Irititja and community consultation when
considering how to store the digital files appropriately. Our ICT manager supports the
housing of the files in a restricted area on the server, which can only be password-accessed by
certain people and their delegates.
What are the outcomes and our future intentions?
During the past year, all Mountford expedition journals with Aboriginal and other significant
historical content have been digitised. This amounts to over 50 journals, and at the time of
writing, about 15,000 scans. Work is now underway to digitise the artworks, and next are the
coloured slides.
As well as contributing to the preservation and management of these materials, and remote
access for researchers, our activities have generated interest from communities who have
indicated a desire to obtain digital copies for their own archives.
Realistically, digital repatriation is the best way for us to provide access to and consult with
communities, in view of our resources, personnel and our vast distance from most of the
communities represented in the collection. We intend to advise stakeholder communities
once the digitised material is ready, and we hope this will lead back to further description and
more definitive advice on restricted and open material once they have reviewed the content,
and decided on its management within their own community culture.
We are fortunate that our organisation legally owns the copyright in Mountford’s materials,
and we try to honour Indigenous intellectual property and moral rights by appropriate
administration, taking community advice and wishes into account, and working towards
digital repatriation.
I will now hand you back to Suzy who will discuss some of the work she has been involved in
to increase access to published items in the State Library pertaining to Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Australians.
Mountford’s personal library
Whilst Denise has been immersing herself in the description of the unpublished items - the
manuscripts, journals and audiovisual output of Mountford - I had the opportunity to gain
new skills by working on a project to catalogue his significant personal library of published
material.
This personal library, which previously formed a part of his archival record group, is a
collection of books and articles that Mountford assembled over his career, almost 1,100 in
total. Whilst a portion of these items already existed in the State Library’s collection, almost
two-thirds of them did not, leaving a large body of important writing on art, anthropology and
Indigenous cultures invisible and inaccessible to our customers.
I worked on the project for 15 months (one day a week) and during that time I added about
1,100 records to the catalogue, including 410 original records which I had created in Libraries
Australia.
The items have been physically integrated into the Library’s Special collection, and are now
able to be retrieved for use in the supervised Reading Room via the regular retrieval channels.
We added the series title C.P. Mountford personal library to each item, easily enabling the list
of the titles to be displayed in its entirety. This is important for maintaining the provenance of
the collection.
Taking on such a project brought benefits for myself as well as the Library and its customers.
Never having catalogued before, I learned new skills and was provided with the opportunity to
gain more knowledge on my specialisation and Library holdings.
And during the project something surprising happened to me – I started to care about
cataloguing, and to think more about the importance of good bibliographic description…
Cataloguing and description
“Given a choice between a number of different tasks, most information professionals
would probably put cataloguing at the bottom of their lists of priorities. It’s a
routine job. It can be boring. The rewards are neither immediate nor obvious.”
From ‘Cataloguing without tears : managing knowledge in the information society’
Jane M. Read, Oxford : Chandos Pub., 2003
This describes how many of us may feel about the task of cataloguing, yet in this age of
information overload the way we describe information becomes more critical than ever.
Especially in a large library with a diverse user-group such as the State Library of South
Australia.
In the Henrietta Fourmile article ‘Who owns the past’ the author states that customers rely on
two factors when seeking information – the skill and good-will of the Librarian searching for
them, and the quality of the information that exists. But I would add a third factor to that - the
skill, knowledge and efforts of the person describing the item in the first place.
After all, the role of a Librarian is to make the right materials available to the right people –
and this starts before the reference interview. Good customer service starts from the moment
an item makes it into our system, and we start thinking about how our customers are going to
look for it; and good cataloguing involves both accurately recording the bibliographic data as
given and adding value to the record with quality subject headings and notes appropriate to
your organisation and its customers.
To state it simply, inadequate subject headings can lead to;
a) not finding enough stuff (due to the lack of, or use of inaccurate subject headings)
b) finding too much stuff (because the subject headings used are too generic), or
c) alienating customers with antiquated, offensive or marginalising language.
Often a customer’s first interaction with a library is via its catalogue, and we know through
our own experiences how easy it is to be put off by something that confuses, annoys or offends
us.
Until recently Australian libraries providing records to Libraries Australia have been limited
to the use of Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). We all know the faults of the
LCSH – its US-focussed, ethnocentric, sometimes convoluted subject headings make it
difficult for Australian library users and staff to describe and locate local subject matter.
Now that the AIATSIS thesaurus has been approved by Libraries Australia the State Library
and others that provide original catalogue records for the national database, will have the
opportunity to access a far greater range of subject headings.
The responsibility for improving the description of Indigenous materials lies not only with
those who regularly catalogue materials, but also with those of us immersed in work involving
Indigenous issues and collections, as we are the one who will have more of an idea about
appropriate subject headings and description. So even if not responsible for cataloguing the
book, we can always offer advice, guidance and feedback to those who are.
Flowing on from this responsibility to improve our own catalogues and databases, as the
ATSILIRN protocols suggest, we then need to shoulder some responsibility for improving the
representation of Australia and its Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population in the
LCSH and other controlled-language thesauri, by pushing for changes, such as AIATSIS has
done by creating their own thesaurus and recently gaining acceptance for its use on Libraries
Australia.
Record Improvement project
With all of this in mind I started thinking of other ways I could use my newly developed
cataloguing skills to improve access to Indigenous materials at the State Library.
I successfully negotiated to continue spending half a day in the Collection Processing team
and put forward a proposal for a ‘Record Improvement’ project. The idea being to go through
the records for items with Indigenous subject matter and improve these records where it
would be beneficial to discovery and access.
This ‘Record improvement’ may involve:
 Adding or changing subject headings to make more specific or contemporary (especially by
adding headings for specific languages or language groups where known)
 Adding explanatory notes if helpful to further explain content
 Overlaying brief records with more comprehensive records from Libraries Australia
 Making changes to Libraries Australia records if appropriate
To assist in providing better description I am using a combination of the following methods:
 Looking at the item
 Searching LCSH
 Checking for more complete/current records on Libraries Australia
 Looking at bibliographies already compiled (such as for Native Title purposes)
 Checking AIATSIS catalogue MURA (up til now I have used this only as a guide, but after
recent discussions with management, I will now be able to add AIATSIS subject headings
when they are the most appropriate.)
So far I have looked through about 650 records and made hundreds of changes to the State
Library catalogue and Libraries Australia. Importantly, this includes the addition of many
language group subject headings. I have also added more detailed notes where available from
other sources.
I have started with the more contemporary materials, and acknowledge that when I arrive at
items catalogued during the earlier times of card catalogues I will indeed have a greater
number of enhancements to do. Many of these only have ‘Aboriginal Australians’ as a subject
heading without any further explanation, and few, if any, will have language group subject
headings applied. It is early records like these that I am especially keen to enhance, as I am
sure that much useful information is contained within these items that are more difficult to
access.
Positive outcomes of the project will include:
 Improved searchability and retrieval for both customers and staff
 More accurate and respectful representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people
on the State Library’s catalogue
 Improved records for Libraries Australia
Put simply, this will translate to more people being able to find the information they need.
Conclusion
As stated above, the work that Denise and I carry out at the State Library of South Australia is
aimed at striking a balance between increasing accessibility and respecting Indigenous
protocols.
We feel that the projects we’ve described to you today are a good start to this, and we
constantly see the benefits of our efforts when we’re helping our customers access the
Library’s collections.
Denise spoke of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, and indeed we hope to see it one day
– but we only will if we keep travelling down the right road…
Thank you.
Suzy Russell and Denise Chapman
Collection Specialists
State Library of South Australia