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Conference Papers Online
Opening and Welcome
Australian Academy of Science
President
Gavan McCarthy, ladies and gentlemen, in the name of
the Australian Academy of Science I’d like very much to welcome you all
here. It’s a lovely, fine, late autumn Canberra day. I hope you can appreciate
the lovely surroundings outside, and really the dignity of this theatre
and perhaps, in your time in Canberra if you’re a stranger here, enjoy
a little bit of the lovely city.
I know among you there are people from Asia, central and
western Europe, the United States and New Zealand, so this is truly an
international gathering and I am sure that many of you will want to go
home with lovely members, with lovely memories of Canberra. Conferences
like this only become possible when there are generous sponsors and supporters
behind the conference, and I am aware that in this case the National Archives
of Australia, formerly the Australian Archives, are involved, the Australian
Research Council, the Academy of Science itself and the Australian Society
of Archivists, and the British Council has also funded two delegates here
from the UK and that’s a fine initiative also.
Now as you would have gathered from Gavan, my discipline
is about 180 degrees, or I thought it was, away from archiving. I have
never thought of myself particularly as a historian or a custodian or anything
like that, but in reflecting on the theme of the conference and what you
are going to talk about in the next couple of days, I did really find some
points of contact, not just professionally, but in my non-professional
life. I remember being really struck by an article that I read a few years
ago that had a detailed discussion of the quartermaster records of the
occupying Roman Army in the UK that was there more now than two thousand
years ago. It struck me as really remarkable that these records were still
around, and the article didn’t just talk about the existence of the records,
but it drew many conclusions about the way the Roman Army had worked, from
these records of the issue of socks and eating utensils and so on to the
Roman Soldiers.
About two or three years ago I was in Switzerland at a
place called Montreux and there is a very nice castle there in which a
number of very famous people were imprisoned at some stage of their lives
and so I took a tour of the castle, and I was told that a hundred years
ago when they were doing one of their many renovations, they turned up
the original architectural records of the castle and all the intervening
architectural records, and those dated back to the tenth century. Well,
one expects the Swiss to be careful about such things, and perhaps it was
careless that they lost the records for a hundred years but I was still
impressed that these records did go back, effectively a thousand years
in the history of this castle, and people had been careful preserving them
before, I guess, there was a Swiss Society of Archivists.
In thinking about archiving and the theme that archivists
work with records, it was pointed out to me by Gavan and I guess this is
probably all too obvious to you, that the context is just as important
as the content. The way I thought of that was to think that the importance
of a scientific discovery, besides its utility, is its novelty or the surprisingness
of the notion, and that measure of the extent to which its surprising,
of course, is a measure that is derived by relating the new knowledge to
the pre-existing knowledge. That quintessentially I think captures the
point that the content only becomes valued and fully understood when it
is related to the pre-existing content of the subject area to which it
relates, and I guess that’s a view I would gather has been acquiring more
and more currency in discussions of archives and perhaps is driving the
way you approach your subject.
I also have come to learn that people who use archives
are, on occasions, able to deduce new scientific knowledge and I understand
there is an example in section six of the conference here where you’re
talking about using the information held in records which describes some
scientific work on AIDS that was greatly facilitated or even led to a breakthrough
as a result of searching the records and that’s a very fine example of
the community benefit you might say of your activity.
As an engineer who’s very close to information technologies
I can also reflect on the great technical challenges that are facing archivists.
It seems to me that the newer computer technologies should lend themselves
to some form of automated intelligent indexing of what is in archives and
allow the assemblage on a automatic basis, in the end because your material
will simply be too great to do otherwise, the assemblage on a automatic
basis of linking capability and the creation of a readily searchable database.
That sort of thing is very challenging from a computer science point of
view and I can see that there would be great potential from marrying that
sort of technology with the use and generation and preservation of archives.
Data visualisation, which you will see at the ANU, is very important but
I believe there would be more to it than that.
Well I think Australia has probably been one of the leaders,
it has certainly been up with the top of the pack in bringing technology
to bear on archives so I do hope that what has been done in this country
can be transmitted else where and also that we in this country can learn
something from our visitors and I do wish you in the next two days great
intellectual stimulation, a developing of an understanding of each others
work patterns and in general terms, every success. Thank you.
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