• Victorian Koorie communities will be the main beneficiaries of the outcomes of this research, including those in rural and regional areas.
  
• Enabling access to oral memory that has been previously unavailable should aid the process of recovery for Indigenous people affected by past government policies. This will hopefully promote the healing of family and community ties and subsequently encourage the regeneration of community life and culture, thus making an important contribution to national efforts of reconciliation.
  
• Consultation, co-operation and collaboration with Indigenous communities will help them to feel part of the decisions made about how their oral memory should be handled. The comprehensive exploration of the needs of Indigenous users of archival services will develop understandings on both sides and enable models for archival strategies and services for Indigenous communities that are driven by their needs. There will also be significant benefit for the Public Record Office of Victoria through improved service delivery, and we hope this will filter through to the archival community in general.
  
• Indigenous peoples across the globe face similar issues relating to access to, and control of, information about themselves and their communities. This project will provide a model for archives around the world to engage in a meaningful dialogue with Indigenous stakeholders.

Significance and Innovation

This project is significant in that it:

• Aims to promote trust in archival systems through the consultative process of the research and thereby compensate for the negative history of government involvement in Indigenous people’s lives.
  
• Will assist and extend another major project which is taking place in Victoria, the Koorie Family History Service (KFHS) Archiving Project, based within the Koorie Heritage Trust Inc. Its aim is to create a database of existing records and oral memory recorded in digital audio and video forms, to be a resource for the Stolen Generations still searching for family members or information, and also for Indigenous people who have been dispossessed of their cultural heritage through the process of colonisation.
  
• Will facilitate access to oral memory for Indigenous communities in regional and rural Victoria.
  
• Will enable the provision of oral memory to Indigenous people in custody, a large proportion of whom do not know who they are, or where they come from.
  
• Will extend the efforts of record-holding agencies to provide culturally appropriate access to their collections for Indigenous people, outside of existing procedures and policies. This should have relevant outcomes for other types of records besides oral memory.
  
• Will attempt to overcome the shortcomings of current models of Government archives in accommodating Indigenous oral memory, whether for evidence, policy development, or cultural understanding.
  
• Will allow for the systematic capture and preservation of representations of oral culture, to lead to an accumulation of heritage in some cases not available in the public domain. This may change attitudes to intellectual property and perhaps require legislative changes.
  
• Will attempt to build trust between the Indigenous communities of Victoria and archival services so that the security, authenticity and integrity of memory and knowledge captured in physical form can be promoted.

Innovations

This project will involve the Indigenous community at every step. For the first time in Australia, we will attempt to underpin action - to improve access of Indigenous communities to oral memory - upon an extensive attempt to understand the needs of the communities involved. The project will employ an Indigenous Research Fellow, develop models for archival strategies and services for Indigenous communities, and seek to employ Indigenous information managers/archivists. Its most innovative aspects are:

• focusing on identifying and addressing the needs of Indigenous communities in relation to access to oral memory and the building of trust in related archival services.
  
• investigating the best methods of capturing and preserving representations of oral memory for long periods of time (at least 100 years). This will involve innovative deployment of culturally sensitive metadata schema, and the development of customised and user friendly interfaces.
  
• understanding and dealing with the complex intellectual property requirements and access rights relating to oral memory.
  
• redefining authenticity to encompass issues relating to representation of oral memory in records.
  
• the technological component consisting of an action-research process that will achieve maximum congruence between the social and technical aspects of the system.
  
• exploring, more broadly, the views of Indigenous people about whether, and to what extent, oral memory can be incorporated into official archives. The possibility of modeling of formal agreements to serve as a basis of trust will be a key aim. This may involve fundamentally challenging current archival ideas about ownership, custody and control.
  

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