Last updated 18 June 2005

History of ASEDA at AIATSIS

ASEDA had its beginnings with the National Lexicography Project at AIAS (as AIATSIS then was) with Bicentennial funding in 1988.  This Project began a collection of Australian language wordlists already existing in machine-readable form.  The name ASEDA and the archive's real establishment came with the appointment of Nicholas Thieberger in 1991 as a Visiting Research Fellow at AIAS/AIATSIS.  He produced paper catalogues in Paper catalogues in 12/91, 6/92 and 11/93, and the last was also available by anonymous FTP and COOMBSQUEST gopher hosted at ANU.  In 1994 he placed the catalogue on the emerging WWW (the May 1994 catalogue was still available in 2003) — as recognised on the Timeline of the Open Access Movement:
1993. The Aboriginal Studies Electronic Data Archive (ASEDA) was launched on gopher by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. A web edition appeared in 1994.
Thieberger developed the archive significantly, along with a number of related projects (including facilitating the publication of several dozen dictionaries 1992-94), and a network of email users in language centres (begun by Simpson and Nash via the Pegasus network).

The third period of growth came with the appointment of David Nathan in 1995 as a Visiting Research Fellow in Interactive Technology.  Nathan developed the Web ASEDA catalogue further (28 May 1996 version is archived), fostered a number of web and multimedia projects, and developed the WWW VL - Aboriginal Languages of Australia, which he has continued after he left AIATSIS in 2000.

From late 2000 ASEDA has continued in the Research section of AIATSIS, with part-time maintenance.  Doug Marmion was part-time curator for May-August 2001, then David Nash between November 2001 and June 2005.

From November 2001 ASEDA began web-publishing a few items (contents here).

In 2003 ASEDA joined OLAC, the Open Language Archives Community.  Similar archives around the world include those in OLAC, and in our region PARADISEC (Pacific And Regional Archive for DIgital Sources in Endangered Cultures).  The ASEDA catalogue was made available as a static repository thanks to Nick Thieberger of PARADISEC, and was first harvested by OLAC in September 2003.  The static repository was moved to the ASEDA site in February 2004.

References

Simpson, Jane & David Nash. 1989. AIAS archive of machine-readable files of Australian languages: the National Lexicography Project. Australian Aboriginal Studies 1/1989, 57-59. [PDF 3.6MB]

Simpson, Jane & David Nash. 1989. AIAS National Lexicography Project. Final Report. Canberra. 14+[36]pp., 8 appendices. Photocopied. AIATSIS Library PMS 4646.

Thieberger, Nicholas. 1993. Dictionaries Project. Australian Aboriginal Studies 2/1993, 120-122.

Thieberger, Nicholas. 1994. New Technology and Australian languages at AIATSIS. Language Matters 2(3),1.

Thieberger, Nicholas. 1994. Report on the AIATSIS Visiting Research Fellowship, Aboriginal Studies Electronic Data Archive. AIATSIS MS 3346

Thieberger, Nicholas. 1995. The Aboriginal Studies Electronic Data Archive (ASEDA). International Journal of the Sociology of Language 113,147-149.

McConvell, Patrick. 2000. Two-Way Research Resources for Indigenous Languages : Positioning Resources in the GARMA. Papers from the Workshop on Web-Based Language Documentation and Description. Dec 15, 2000. Institute for Research in Cognitive Science (IRCS) University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Marmion, Doug. 2001. Report.
 

URL http://www1.aiatsis.gov.au/ASEDA/hist/index.html