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Unlike many archival organisations, the University of Melbourne's eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC) is not a custodial repository or a teaching facility. This allows the centre to collaborate with a wide range of organisations and individuals, bringing archival thinking and practice to a variety of sectors, many of which are not traditionally associated with information professionals. Central to all the ESRC's work is the importance of effectively documenting things and their context. This paper draws on project examples, the author's PhD research and key concepts from archival and knowledge management theory to explore the idea that effective documentation requires more than a focus on items and collections. Instead, it requires working with individuals, organisations and documentary resources (published and unpublished) to reveal explicit connections and capture implicit knowledge in ways which more accurately reflect the complexity of collections and the entities needed to understand them. These ideas are introduced using two examples: a series of projects carried out over many years with the Victorian Government's Department of Primary Industries and its successors and The Australian Ballet. The paper then uses key concepts from this work to explore the nature of museum documentation and some of the limitations of current practice in museums, including the specific example of the Nordström mining models held by Museum Victoria. Thinking about these issues in the digital world, and applying archival thinking, the author argues for better connections between collection materials, not through convergence but by expanding our concept of collection documentation to include the relationships between things as things in their own right. Arguing for the practical benefits of such a change, the paper concludes by suggesting that testing these ideas in a museum context has the potential to further develop the ideas of the ESRC in ways which will benefit society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preserving and providing access to local archives is one of the roles performed by public libraries in New South Wales. This role is not mandated, nor is it a stated priority for public libraries. Local government records are regulated by legislation, but what of the other records documenting the lives of rural and city communities? In many cases the library’s local studies collection becomes the default home of the archives of local community organisations and of individuals whose personal papers are acquired by libraries. In some cases, the library shares the role of maintaining local archives with historical societies, museums and universities. The result is a functioning example of distributed custody, where public libraries and other local institutions take responsibility for local archives. This paper is a case study that draws on two major surveys of local studies collections undertaken by the State Library of NSW, the first in 1984 and the second in 2013–2014. It concludes that public libraries have been critical for over 50 years in ensuring that local archives have been acquired and managed, despite there being no explicit regulatory or policy frameworks for doing so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian Federal Government's Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) has built an important collection of learning and teaching resources for the higher education (HE) sector, a product of the many projects OLT and its precursors, including the Australian Learning and Teaching Council and the Carrick Institute, have funded over the past two decades. Although these resources are freely available on its website, the OLT considers them underutilised. Hence it has commissioned a project to reorganise the collection using more accurate and consistent metadata. This paper presents the results of the initial phase of the project, in which a new metadata schema for the OLT's repository was developed through a systematic analysis of the collection, users' and prospective users' search needs, and the domain of HE learning and teaching. While the methods used to develop controlled vocabularies, such as subject thesauri, are well established, there has been far less discussion about how schemas for describing particular kinds of information resource should be constructed. This article contributes to this discussion by showing how methods used to build controlled vocabularies can be applied, and combined, to the development of a schema used to support effective access to a scholarly repository of national importance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]