Archives Outside

For people who love, use and manage archives

Archives Outside - For people who love, use and manage archives

The criminal underworld of Sydney in the 1840s [video]

william-augustus-miles

Scandals, Crime and Corruption: History Week 2009 will be a wild journey through the dark shadows of our past. Discover the scandals, crime and corruption that have shocked us over time and shaped our history, sometimes in unexpected ways.

In keeping with this criminal theme we have put together this entertaining video Registry of Flash Men. It is a unique insight into the criminal underworld in Sydney during the 1840s.

The video features extracts from the journal Registry of Flash Men narrated by its writer ‘William Augustus Miles’ (aka Fabian LoSchiavo)

The journal was an official surveillance record by William Augustus Miles who was Superintendent, then Commissioner, of Sydney Police in New South Wales from July 1840 to July 1848. Miles held the belief that much crime was caused by the contamination of innocent people, and that most of the crime in Sydney was the result of former convicts mixing with free immigrants. He believed that the criminal class required constant surveillance by the police.

State Records on CAN [video]

cy-and-canCollections Australia Network (CAN) is a public gateway to collecting institutions across Australia. CAN is currently involved in an open federated search project – the aim is to provide a single (or federated) search of the record collections of its partners which include libraries, galleries, museums and archives all across Australia.

Christine Yeats, Manager of Public Access at State Records NSW, was recently interviewed by CAN. She spoke about collection searching on CAN as a way of bringing documents and archives to life when alongside objects from other institutions.

Read more on the CAN Outreach blog – it includes a transcript of the YouTube video below, very handy if you can’t access YouTube from work.

Christine Yeats will be a regular contributor to the Archives Ouside blog. She manages the Public Access program at State Records NSW, providing direction for its principal streams of activity – the reading room services, research, outreach and other public activities and initiatives.  Christine is also Treasurer of the History Council; Convenor of the ASA Reference, Access and Public Programs Special Interest Group; President of the Randwick and District Historical Society; a member of the Sydney Joint Committee of the Australia Women’s Archives Project and the Professional Historians Association.

Preserving your digital data [video]

dpe-videoAt the recent Association of Canadian Archivists Conference in May, Professor Seamus Ross from the University of Toronto gave an entertaining talk on approaches to digitisation and handling of digital materials. He showed this video, which he was involved in developing, Digital Preservation and Nuclear Disaster: An Animation featuring ‘Digi Man’. It is a lot of fun and addresses some of the issues surrounding digital records preservation.

You can see more on the Digital Preservation Europe website.

Related posts: