A long-term project in which the Academy has been involved in some form for decades has been reinvented.
The former Encyclopedia of Australian Science—a web resource that has been running since the early days of the internet—has relaunched as the Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation and is now part of the Centre for Transformative Innovation at Swinburne University. The guest speaker at the event was Academy Fellow Professor the Hon Barry Jones, who described the encyclopedia as “an exceptionally interesting and important research archive about the contribution of Australia to science and innovation”.
The encyclopedia is a register of information about people and organisations involved in Australian science and technology since the 1800s. It acts as a gateway to science archives and memory institutions across the country.
The project has its roots in an article published by the Australian Journal of Science in 1962 titled: ‘A Check List of Publications on the History of Australian Science’, authored by Ann Mozley (later Moyal) who was a research associate at the then brand-new library of the Australian Academy of Science. Ann Moyal was also the person who originated the Academy archival collection, and it is believed that her article was the first attempt at collating a general bibliography of the history of Australian science.
Further attempts to provide a comprehensive list of relevant bibliographical resources were published occasionally in Academy’s journal Historical Records of Australian Science from 1966.
More recent efforts were made by the Australian Science Archives Project, established in 1985 by the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Melbourne University and led by Professor Rod Home (then the editor-in-chief of the Academy’s journal). The project had its Canberra office in the Shine Dome and was tasked with locating and finding a home for the archives of Australian science and scientists, including many belonging to Academy Fellows.
Associate Professor Gavan McCarthy, who was the first staff member on the project (and who has assisted periodically with Academy collections since then) tells a story about contacting Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, winner of the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, in the last few months of Burnet’s life. Burnet responded that he had kept everything going back to his early childhood but wasn’t sure if anyone was interested and was waiting to be approached. The collection found a home at the University of Melbourne.
Burnet responded that he had kept everything going back to his early childhood but wasn’t sure if anyone was interested and was waiting to be approached. The collection found a home at the University of Melbourne.
The Science Archives Project established a paper-based filing system, then a relational database and was first published online in 1994, then again in 2000. By 2010, many of the technical barriers that prevented the creation of a single resource had been overcome, and the Encyclopedia of Australian Science was created to map the personal, academic, professional and historical networks that existed between scientists and scientific organisations. In 2012, the recipient of the Academy’s Moran Award for History of Science Research travelled to Canberra to link up the Academy archives with the encyclopedia.
The encyclopedia stayed a project of Melbourne University until 2020, then landed at Swinburne in 2021. Much work was done to update and revitalise records in the lead-up to the official relaunch in November this year. It is very much community-driven and volunteer-curated and a perpetual work in progress, and is an excellent resource on the history of science in Australia.
© 2024 Australian Academy of Science
