Understanding the needs of Indigenous communities
There are a number of significant issues that need to be explored within Indigenous communities before an appropriate archival system can be built, such as archival descriptive practice, access, intellectual property, and authenticity of records, all of which relate to ownership, custodianship and control of the memories involved.

• Some information and memories are regarded as secret and/or sacred and restricted access may be required.
• Archival services need to provide culturally sensitive access to their present collections in a more comprehensive and cohesive way.
• Common access guidelines to records are needed in each state and territory (Bringing Them Home Report (HREOC 1997)).
• Access issues are related to questions of intellectual property which, in Australia, is based around Western legal concepts of property rights, including copyright.
• More complex intellectual property controls are required by indigenous people in Australia.
• Many of the tests for authenticity of records require examination of the content and context of a record. Given that the operation of archives implicitly assumes that archivists can access the content of records (even if the records are closed to the general public), this assumption will need to be challenged to account for the cultural sensitivities of Indigenous oral memory.

Archival system issues

• Archival services and practices in Australia have evolved from European/Western traditions, and tend to use the language and world view of the records' creators – largely governments, churches and private organisations - impacting on what is remembered and what is forgotten. For example, the use of European names for Aboriginal people and places as indexing terms in records and archival systems has hampered access for family link-up, land claims and other purposes.
  
• In relation to ownership, custody and control of Indigenous records created by traditional organisations, archival policies have privileged the records' creators, rather than the Indigenous people and communities who are documented in the records.
  
• While there have been initiatives to consult Indigenous communities in relation to the provision of archival services, these initiatives have all taken place within established, Western models of archival services and systems.
  
• From the results of a user needs analysis, this project will develop socio-technical models of Indigenous community-oriented archival services. These models will form the functional requirements for building a prototype of an archival system to capture and provide access to representations of oral memory.
  
• This prototype will demonstrate how the needs of Indigenous communities might be met by applying archival techniques and technology relating to storage and access formats, culturally sensitive metadata schema, authenticity requirements for representing oral memory, and appropriate access through user-friendly interfaces.

Technological issues
The background work to preserving oral memory can be found in efforts to digitise oral history, although oral memory is likely to encompass far more than oral history, for example, representations of oral memory may not just be captured in audio records. In preserving oral history, Seadle (2001) identifies the following factors which the present project could address:

• selection of long-term preservation formats;
• the use of metadata to describe oral history;
• control of intellectual property.

The previous work on oral history does not consider the issues of authenticity, long-term preservation, or non-Western intellectual property.

There is a significant amount of work required to generalise the lessons of digitising oral history to the broader questions of oral memory; particularly as oral memory may involve other modalities (e.g. video) not present in simple oral history. The InterPARES (2002) and Victoria Electronic Records Strategy (VERS) (Public Record Office Victoria, 1999) initiatives both relate to technological solutions to the long term preservation of authentic records. Although they have not addressed the issue of authenticity in records of oral memory, their findings relating to how technology can support trusted systems will be adapted and extended in this project.

REFERENCES:

HREOC (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission) (1997) Bringing Them Home- The Report.
(Reconciliation and Social Justice Library) http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/special/rsjproject/rsjlibrary/hreoc/stolen/stolen37.html. Accessed 4 Nov 2002.

Seadle, M. (2001) ‘Sound Practice: A report of the best practices for digital sound’, RLG DigiNews, Vol 5, No 2.
http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews5-2.html#feature3. Accessed 4 Nov 2002.

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