The Australian Dictionary of Biography Online website is the Internet version of the ADB's traditional print volumes. It is operated by the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB), Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. The website is a joint production of the ADB and the Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre, University of Melbourne (Austehc).
The biographical articles published in the first online edition are those found in the printed ADB: Volumes 1 to 16 in the continuing series and the Supplementary Volume. The articles are concise, authoritative accounts of the lives of significant and representative persons in Australian history. It should be noted, however, that they were written progressively from the early 1960s to the present. Therefore, some may not reflect the latest scholarship or current mores. Print publication details, including the year, accompany each article.
The ADB Online is available free on the web. It has been designed to enable and encourage scholarly practice in the electronic world, and to provide a service to all users of the Internet.
Every endeavour has been made to ensure that the output meets the highest standards of accessibility and usability. Similarly, every effort has been made to eliminate faults in the electronic text resulting from imperfect scanning etc. Users who notice any residual defects are invited to contact the ADB staff.
In the ADB the most eminent people in Australia's history are given articles of 2000 to 6000 words; other significant figures have entries that range in length from 500 to 2000 words. While the dictionary covers the orthodox fields of politics, business, religion, the land, the professions and the arts, it also attempts to reflect the rich variety of Australian life by including representatives of every social group and sphere of endeavour. Articles on these representative people are usually 500 to 750 words in length.
The ADB Online has taken a number of key elements from each article--date and place of birth and death, cultural heritage, religious influences, and occupations--and placed them in a database. The database is used to generate output to the web and provide a wide variety of means or pathways by which users can find biographies that are of interest or useful for research. See Biographies help section for further details.
In the original printed volumes of the ADB, the subjects of biographical articles who were mentioned in articles on other individuals were generally identified by the abbreviation q.v., followed by the relevant volume number, after their names. Each q.v. has been removed from the online text and replaced by a hyperlink to the article on the person so mentioned. The use of q.v. was not universal in the printed volumes, however, mainly because it was not known, when each series was being produced, who would be included in future series. The process of identifying individuals on whom articles were later written, and of adding hyperlinks to those articles, is ongoing.
It is hoped that one day every biography in the ADB Online will be accompanied by a portrait image. The process of locating, negotiating rights and digitally imaging portraits is a time consuming exercise. The National Library of Australia, through its PictureAustralia service, had already covered much of this ground and provides the infrastructure that brings significant efficiencies to this task. Each portrait shown in the ADB Online is also registered in PictureAustralia and a link takes the user to that image. From there the user can find similar or related images.
When published in print each biography is accompanied by a select bibliography of major references used in the compilation of the article. Our aim, wherever possible, is to take those abbreviated citations, expand them, uniquely register them, and link them to all the articles that used them. This task is ongoing and new data is added as it becomes available. Furthermore, the ADB Online is keen to cite and link to other resources that have added to the literature since the original publication of the biographies.
Work continues on both the enrichment of the content and enhancement of the underlying database. Later print volumes of the ADB will be incorporated in the online edition.
The ADB Online website was initially made possible by financial and other support from a number of organisations, in particular the Australian Research Council. For full details see the Acknowledgments page. Other institutions, notably those participating in the National Library of Australia's PictureAustralia, also supported the project.
Melbourne University Publishing is the publisher of the Australian Dictionary of Biography in other media.
The Australian Dictionary of Biography is a national, co-operative enterprise, founded and maintained by the Australian National University (ANU), as a project that fulfils one of the original purposes of the university. It consists of a research and editorial staff headed by a general editor in Canberra; an editorial board; and regional, federal and specialist working parties. The ANU provides the ADB with its accommodation, operating funds and administrative organisation. It is a part of the History Program in ANU's Research School of Social Sciences (RSSS).
The Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre, based in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne, is also a national, co-operative enterprise. It was founded in 1985 as the Australian Science Archives Project in the University's Department of History and Philosophy of Science. Its original aim was to assist the documentation of Australian science, technology, medicine and related disciplines. It now undertakes a broader range of activities in the field of cultural informatics and provides software and expertise for those wishing to engage in humanities computing in Australia and overseas. From 2004 the Centre received some core funding from the University but it still relies on grants and project funds to finance its operations. A key software tool developed by the Centre, the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), is being used and further developed by the ADB Online project to manage all the data and provide the web interface.
Australian Dictionary of Biography Online, Copyright 2006, updated continuously, ISSN 1833-7538
Published by the Australian National University
http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/about.htm