- Summary
Gavan McCarthy is Director of the eScholarship Research Centre at the University of Melbourne, and a member of the Executive Committee on the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy Australian Social Science Data Archive (ASSDA) - ASeSS Project. He is the Director of the Melbourne node of ASSDA, and a Chief Investigator on the ARC LIEF.
Details
Gavan McCarthy is a leader in the field of cultural informatics with emphasis on the building of sustainable information resources and services to support research. The Australian Science Archives Project, which commenced in 1985, pioneered the development of national information services and infrastructure to support the history of Australian science, technology, medicine and engineering through the utilisation of the emerging digital technologies. McCarthy is noted in Australia and overseas for his innovative and research-driven approach. His book, Guide to the Archives of Science in Australia: Records of Individuals (D.W. Thorpe, 1991), was generated from a relational database and the content re-purposed for online publication, first on the pre-web Internet, and then on the web as Bright Sparcs. This data is still alive and actively maintained today and is regarded an exemplar of sustainable digital scholarly practice.
In 1995 his work was recognised internationally, and he has travelled overseas every year since to work with long-term collaborative partners such as Imperial College London and since 2002 with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). It is here that he has been working a new conceptual approach to the immensely problematic issue of the long-term management of information about radioactive waste - the worst-case conceivable for multi-generational management of knowledge necessary for the well-being of society and the environment. However, using this same epistemic approach to sustainable information infrastructure has led to many successful ARC projects either as a technical partner or more recently as a Chief Investigator. McCarthy was amongst the first humanities scholars to receive ARC funding to support information infrastructure development (1992-1994), and has been consistently successful in the years since. The most publicly successful of these projects was the collaborative partnership with the Australian National University (2004-2006) to transform the Australian Dictionary of Biography into an online research resource of world stature.
The commercial success of the archiving software developed by his team, led to the creation of a research centre, the Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre (Austehc), in 1999. Recognising that the Austehc software, services and expertise were widely applicable across all disciplines in 2007 the University of Melbourne invited McCarthy to lead a new University-wide eScholarship Research Centre. He continues to participate in international standards projects he is currently working with the National Library of Australia on the People Australia project, which is arguably one of the most significant re-workings of our national information infrastructure since the information boom of the nineteenth century.
The production of generic database-web service tools to support cultural informatics projects and research in the humanities has been an underlying theme of Gavan McCarthy’s career. The two principle outcomes of this work are the Heritage Documentation Management System (HDMS) - an archival program management system - and the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM) - a contextual information framework mapping system that can integrate and contextualise information from a wide range of distributed or local sources. The uptake of the HDMS has been wide-spread by University archives and small archival institutions engineered, both in Australia and the United Kingdom. The development of record-digitisation technologies and their modular integration with the HDMS has transformed the accessibility of archival collections for research. The OHRM, on the other hand has become more widely utilised by the research community and has underpinned the work of a number of important research undertakings including the Australian Women’s Archives Project, the award-winning Australian Dictionary of Biography Online, and eGold: A Nation’s Heritage.
A more substantial list of projects can be found on the eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC) web site Key Resources page. See also information about the range of HDMS users and a list of Guides to Collections published from the HDMS both by the ESRC and others.
Prepared by: Rachel Tropea
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Created: 21 April 2009, Last modified: 26 August 2009