eResearch showcase

Colonial Australian Popular Fiction-tile

Colonial Australian Popular Fiction: A Digital Archive

Colonial Australian Popular Fiction is an online bibliography and digital archive that gathers together for the first time a wide range of vibrant colonial writing that has previously been difficult to access. This archive began as part of a larger ARC-funded project based at the University of Melbourne, Australia, which has been examining the history of Australian popular or genre fiction from the early to late colonial period.

Colonial Australian Popular Fiction website

The Australian Sound Design Project

Australian Sound Design Project

The Australian Sound Design Project (ASDP) has pioneered the interdisciplinary field of sound design in public space through its website, database, publications, exhibitions and public advocacy. The original works of over 200 sound designers, artists and composers have been published in sound text and image in the gallery... These free and accessible research tools, the text, graphics, video, sound, two advanced search engines and multi-media refereed articles have been used by academics and the public sector to source information, and as a basis for sound courses worldwide.

Australian Sound Design Project website

The australian womens register logo

Australian Women’s Register

The searchable-on-line Australian Women’s Register is a valuable and growing source of biographical data about Australian women and their organisations, with hyper-links to the archival repositories and libraries where their records are held and to other sources of information. You can search by functional classification, for example, ‘P’ covers physicists, politicians, pharmacists, pacifists and many more. The register contains 7023 entries with references to 4273 archival resources, 8934 published resources and 1276 digital resources.

Australian Women’s Register website

Childhood, Tradition and Change

Childhood, Tradition and Change

Childhood, Tradition and Change is a nation-wide study that documents and analyses the historical development of Australian children’s playlore over a fifty year period. Funded by the Australian Research Council Linkage Project Scheme, with support from the University of Melbourne, Deakin University, Curtin University of Technology, the National Library of Australia and Museum Victoria, research for the project was carried out over four years (2007-2010). A team of experienced fieldworkers travelled to primary schools in every Australian state and territory to collect material that forms the basis of a new archive of Australian children’s folklore.

Childhood, Tradition and Change website

Early Modern Disaster

Early Modern Disaster

The aim of this website is to provide information on the Australian Research Council funded project Reading the Signs: disaster, apocalypse and demonology in European print culture, 1450-1700. Violent religious conflict, apocalyptic speculation and heightened fears of diabolical threat were critical themes in the stories and images of natural disaster that rolled off German, French, Dutch, Austrian and Swiss presses in the first two centuries of print. The project aims were to provide a systematic and comparative study of the representation, meaning, impact and control of such disasters in early modern European culture; and to assess the resilience of religious frameworks in a period when views of nature were becoming more secular.

Early Modern Disaster website

eGold - a Nation’s Heritage: Electronic encyclopedia of gold in Australia

eGold – a Nation’s Heritage: Electronic encyclopedia of gold in Australia

This website celebrates Castlemaine and Ballarat as founding pieces of the gold story, and promotes sites across Australia where people can see and experience part of the story. It is a living resource for those interested in family or local history, technology or material culture, and is tailored to the needs of students, scholars, enthusiasts, visitors and the general public. Telling the story of gold through images, stories and multimedia interactives, it connects individual stories to the wider historical themes of global gold rushes, global migration flows, building the Australian nation and democratic change during the gold rushes.

eGold website

eMelbourne: Encyclopedia of Melbourne online

eMelbourne: Encyclopedia of Melbourne online

The Encyclopedia is an A to Z reference work covering the city’s history from pre-European settlement up to the present day. Alphabetical entries range from short factual summaries about places, institutions and events, through to extended survey articles on key topics such as Architecture, Aboriginal Melbourne, Economy, Foundation and Early Settlement, Law and Order, Literature, Science, Sport, Suburbia, Theatre and Transport. The online Encyclopedia of Melbourne – eMelbourne – contains the full text of the print volume, with additional text and digital resources.

eMelbourne website

Find & Connect

Find & Connect

Find & Connect Australia is a website for Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants, and for everyone with an interest in the history of out-of-home ‘care’ in Australia. The website brings together historical resources relating to institutional ‘care’ at the national level in Australia. The Find & Connect web resource has been developed by a team of historians, archivists and social workers from the University of Melbourne and Australian Catholic University, with funding from the Australian Government.

Find & Connect website

Melbourne Podtours

Melbourne Podtours

We invite you to put on your walking shoes, turn on your MP3 player and discover Melbourne’s secrets with the ABC Melbourne Podtours. Whether you’re a visitor to the city or a born and bred local, you’ll be surprised at the stories that you’ll uncover in Melbourne’s hidden lanes and historical buildings. Join Derek Guille, Jon Faine and Red Symons as they guide you through the sights, sounds and smells of Melbourne town with these free audio tours that you can download to your MP3 player. The tours are a co-production with the University of Melbourne’s Cultural Heritage Unit.

Melbourne Podtours web page

Melbourne prints

Melbourne prints: Renaissance and early modern print culture

Showcases a range of significant pre-1700 prints and rare books held in the Baillieu Library at the University of Melbourne. It is a dynamic website, created and utilised by students and staff in a range of discipline areas across the University of Melbourne. Its aim is to document and deepen knowledge of the content, material production and provenance of these cultural objects. The Melbourne Prints website was developed with the support of a Scholarly Innovation Grant from the Baillieu Library at the University of Melbourne.

Melbourne prints website

MelGROSH: Melbourne gateway to research on Soviet history

MelGROSH: Melbourne gateway to research on Soviet history

This website examines Soviet Politics and Economic History of the Stalin period. MelGrosh combines several different suites of databases as well as collections of documents and other materials. The website contains sections of politics, repression, demography, economic history and famine. The political section, for example, contains an indication of the wealth of empirical data that is now available to characterise the working of the complex Soviet political system. It contains biographical data and photographs of the major officials. It also contains the names of the major political bodies (both party and state) their administrative history and the main officials who held positions within them.

MelGROSH website

PARADISEC

PARADISEC

The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) is a digital archive of records of some of the many small cultures and languages of the world. Our research group has developed models to ensure that the archive can provide access to interested communities, and conforms with emerging international standards for digital archiving. We have established a framework for accessioning, cataloguing and digitising audio, text and visual material, and preserving digital copies. A primary goal is to safely preserve material that would otherwise be lost. In this way we can make field recordings available to the people and communities recorded, and to their descendants.

PARADISEC website

Pathways to the Past

Pathways to the Past

This website introduces a range of primary historical resources for undergraduate research in Australian History. Pathways to the Past is a virtual gateway to modules which will investigate concepts and methods of historical research across a range of sources such as images, objects, maps, places, and manuscripts. These modules do not replace existing lectures and classes, but make possible structured individual instruction that parallels face-to-face teaching and enriches student skills and knowledge of the past.

Pathways to the Past website

Reason in Revolt: Source Documents of Australian Radicalism

Reason in Revolt: Source Documents of Australian Radicalism

Reason in Revolt brings together primary source documents of Australian radicalism as a readily accessible digitised resource. By ‘radical’ we refer to those who aimed to make society more equal and to emancipate the exploited or oppressed. The Reason in Revolt website is an expanding record of the movements, institutions, venues and publications through which radicals sought to influence Australian society.

Reason in Revolt website