Cirrus@Austlit

'Fifty years after the publication of the first volume of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, in mid-2016 participants from around the English-speaking world gathered in Canberra for the conference ‘“True Biographies of Nations”? Exploring the Cultural Journeys of Dictionaries of National Biography’.1 Organised by the National Centre of Biography at The Australian National University (ANU) and supported by the National Library of Australia (NLA), the conference provided a rare opportunity for those involved in the production of dictionaries of national biography to come together, along with archivists, librarians, fellow researchers, and members of the public, to reflect on the purpose and place of national biographies in the twenty-first century. The aim was to explore the cultural journeys taken by dictionaries of national biography, to consider the challenges and opportunities facing such projects today, and to gauge the extent of their development into truly national biographies.'  (Publication summary)

'The Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) is one of many biographical dictionary projects developing advanced biographical functions. The ADB is the largest and longest-running project of national collaboration of social scientists in Australia, having started in the late 1950s. Over 4,500 authors have contributed to its 13,500 entries. In 2006 the ADB made the cultural journey from a printed book to an online digital research resource. Since then staff have created companion biographical websites: Obituaries Australia, which reproduces published obituaries; and People Australia, which features other biographical material such as records from Who’s Who and out-of-copyright compendiums of biography. People Australia also acts as a Biographical Register. These companion websites now give us the technical capacity to register all deceased Australians in our websites. Since 2011 we have also begun to comprehensively index all entries, which, in turn, allows us to automatically generate visualisation tools, such as family trees.' 

 (Introduction)

'An Indigenous Australian Dictionary of Biography (IADB) is a new Australian Research Council–funded research project I am leading with Malcolm Allbrook and Tom Griffiths, which seeks to redress the long-standing underrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people within the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) by doubling the number of Indigenous biographies within the online ADB, and producing a stand-alone published volume of Indigenous short biographies. Yet, rather than just producing 190 new entries, our aim is also to rethink how Indigenous biographies can be conceptualised, being attentive to how and why Indigenous biography is distinctive, and how Indigenous people, who have long been marginalised and excluded from the national imaginary, can now be better accommodated with the ADB, and hence be better incorporated within the national story.'  (Introduction)