ASA WA PD day – Creating the Archives’ toolkit

5th September 2025, UWA Reid Library seminar room

Collection Management

Annie Cameron, UWA Berndt Museum

WA indigenous language centres – indigenous data sovereignty and cultural policies.

AI is not a thing if you don’t have your records digitised – reflecting remote language centres, who may not even have archive collection practices.

Provence to include the agencies/locations the record has moved through in it’s lifetime. e.g. marriage certificates in the Bernt Museum that came from the Moore River settlement.

Appraising records:

  • Uniqueness
  • Social, cultural, political value
  • Resources to identify material – the original places where objects came from is the best place for understanding description and context.

Thinking through the problems of collections series organised by format vs provenance – difficult to link records and objects to have the entire story if by format.

Terry Janke ICIP website https://www.terrijanke.com.au/icip – WA University session (w/ Library Research Staff???) Blog: Keeping Our Data Strong: Upholding Indigenous Data Sovereignty Through Data Sharing Agreements

Rebecca Balling – Wanneroo Community History Centre

Digitisation project with DCWA. Sun City Yanchep News digitisation, DCWA delivering PDF as access copies, OCR’d with Tesseract documentation | Tesseract OCR

Using Significance 2.0 for assessing items for digitisation.

In CollectionsWA and the Wanneroo Library Catalogue (running on Spydus)

Gerard Foley, SRO Senior Archivist, Access

<via video playback>

Evaluating Archival Management Systems – Piers Higgs, GAIA Resources

ICAG – descriptive vs Australian series systems (we’re an island of description)

ISAD-G standard

Records in Context

International vendors / open source build to ISAD-G, rarely have Australian series.

DCWA tour

Ben Heath, Photographic Digitisation Officer

Very insightful to illustrate the differing effects of lighting on embossed, damaged and foil paper as well as 3D objects e.g. key to Winthrop Hall.

Flat, omnidirectional lighting is the FADGI standard, but it can lose shadow detail from the raised edges of embossed papers. DCWA will sometimes supply captures using alternate lighting e.g. raked to show shadows.

Repair and restoration in Photoshop using AI – Mark Brogan

Repair vs restore vs enhancement – what are we comfortable with in the archives?

ref supplied slides – a demo of photo enhancement tools in Photoshop.

Handwriting recognition using AI – Arooba Maqsood ECU PhD student

Base training will affect what’s possible in recognising different languages. e.g. German handwriting differs from English which does not contain umlauts.

Post digitisation – Meg Travers, GAIA

Panel discussion – records, data and evidentiary value

 

 

 

 

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