Vincent Blake | November 06, 2007
GOING online has been a successful move for National Archives of Australia.
Anne Lyons at National Archives of Australia in Canberra
In April it came up at number three, ahead of World Cup Cricket but behind Paris Hilton, says Lyons, who is in charge of public access to the historical treasures the archives hold.
National Archives has been digitising documents and images in its care since 2001.
Lyons was brought in to oversee a review in 2004 of how the public was using its services. At that time, the archives had 8.6million pages and 103,000 photos in its online searchable database.
Digitisation continued apace. In 2005-06 it had 14.9 million pages and 104,000 photos in its online database. That increased to 19 million and 174,000 in 2006-07.
At present the archives have 8.6TB of web-accessible data. The high-resolution printable documents represent 5TB of this.
The figures are set to surge, given that six of the National Archives' eight state and territory reading rooms have cut their opening hours from five days a week to three in the past financial year.
The change has enabled staff to dedicate more time to digitising records for the web, for printing and prosperity.
"Putting digitised national records online has made the archives up to be more accessible to the average person," Lyons says.
"It has expanded dramatically the availability of our archival heritage to all Australians. They can go into a local library and look at it if they do not have their own internet or email access.
"It definitely has changed how we deliver, and our interaction with people."
So much so that 93 per cent of National Archives public access is now online, she says.
Being accessible online "is really providing access to the records", she says.
"We've got 10 different websites. We run a website on prime ministers, and another on democracy called Documenting our Democracy - all getting information out to the public."
The spike earlier this year on the Sensis search engine was prompted by a fresh addition to the archives' online offering.
"We launched our Gift to the Nation, which is our World War I service records," she says.
The Sensis search engine statistics gave National Archives a measure of a purely Australian audience searching for Gift to the Nation, she says.
"It got a lot of publicity in April. That is when it appeared on the Sensis most-searched list.
"I think people were searching for the service records online and remembered it was the National Archives.
"We found that quite interesting because not a lot of people know a lot about the National Archives of Australia.
"We are one of the national institutions, but people do not really know what an archive is."
If they know what an archive is, they may not know it is open to the public, but they are finding out, she says.
Users of the National Archives were, for its first 100 years, researchers, academics and authors with particular interests.
"But now, once people find they have access to this information, our largest user group is genealogists and people looking for their family history," she says.
The most popular searches are for WWI service and post-1901 immigration records.
Lyons is working with education authorities to rebuild Vrroom - a virtual reading room - to help secondary school students learn the importance of using primary source material when researching.
"We are working with an organisation called the Curriculum Corporation and the Learning Federation," she says.
"We are working with them to get records up online with an educational value. It might be a record or a photo.
"We are working on an educational values statement, where they describe what the record is from a educational perspective.
"We are rebuilding that. We had it in one format and it was not that stable. We are adding to it and will hopefully launch later this year," she says.
"The faces of Australia we have on the website are digital copies of a photo wall that we have in here in Canberra.
"For me it was important to get a bricks-and-mortar experience in the virtual world and combine them."