Cultural Collections

Internal collections

Within The University of Melbourne there have been a number of internal projects within what would previously have been known as the Library utilizing non-traditional metadata.

Some of these are:
• UMAIC (University of Melbourne Archives Image Catalogue)
  This database includes "... [a] photograph collection with approximately 1400 images that capture the evolving landscape and buildings of the University, ceremonies and celebrations, as well as many past staff. UMAIC also displays 1,000 selected images from the John Ellis Photograph Collection of Peace and Protest Movements in Melbourne (1971-1996).
  These records are harvested by PictureAustralia.
• Grainger Museum
  Various items from the Grainger Museum have been described in Libraries Australia. These records were harvested by MusicAustralia in a MODS format.

There are a number of additional internal projects in the pipeline. As they come to fruition information will be added to this page.

External projects

The Middle East and North Africa before 1860

The University of Melbourne and Al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco are making available their collection of images of the Middle East and North Africa before the coming of photography.

These images, mainly from the seventeenth eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are drawn from plates in the rare books collection of both universities. Until now, these pictures have been hard to find. They have been digitised so that they can be used for teaching and simple viewing. The images are organised according to the original books, and they remain the property of the originating university.

The University of Melbourne Special Collections hold around 200,000 volumes of books, journals and pamphlets. Al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane’s collection of material on Morocco, while much smaller, is also one of the best collections anywhere on early modern Morocco.

The first selection of images were made as part of the ARC Imagebank Project: a web-based Humanities Image Database and Descriptive Catalogue for Academic, Industry and Community Application (Australian Government: Australian Research Council: Special Research Initiative - E-Research: Dr SM Broomhall, University of Western Australia; Dr BC Stocks, Monash University; Dr R Pennell, University of Melbourne; Mr C Wood, Australians Studying Abroad / Elsewhereonline.com.au)

As the Elsewhereonline web site describes the ARC grant: This research develops a web-based visual database and catalogue with associated, annotatable explanatory text files, that is suitable for input and access by academics, industry and the general community. The catalogue’s information input and search mechanisms will respond to the needs of relevant Humanities disciplines for which image collection and analysis is a critical research tool. Its design aims to encourage user communities to contribute images and text efficiently, effectively and confidently, and guarantees the security of their images through application of a tag system. The collaboratively authored image catalogue would facilitate national and international research projects.