Abstract. This article provides an overview of evolving Australian records continuum theory and the records continuum model, which is interpreted as both a metaphor and a new worldview, representing a paradigm shift in Kuhn's sense. 1 It is based on a distillation of research findings drawn from discourse, literary warrant and historical analysis, as well as case studies, participant observation and reflection. The article traces the emergence in Australia in the 1990s of a community of practice which has taken continuum rather than life cycle based perspectives, and adopted postcustodial approaches to recordkeeping and archiving. It "places" the evolution of records continuum theory and practice in Australia in the context of a larger international discourse that was reconceptualizing traditional theory, and "reinventing" records and archives practice.
This article explores the role of archives in the construction of Australian Indigeneity, past, present and future, with reference to the colonial and postcolonial culture of the archive in Australia, the possibilities for refiguring the archive present in post-colonial thinking, Indigenous ways of knowing, and digital technologies, and the role of reconciling research in that process. It presents the main findings of an Australian Research Council-funded project, Trust and Technology: Building Archival Systems for Indigenous Oral Memory, and draws on Ph.D. research undertaken by Shannon Faulkhead relating to the role that written and oral records play as sources of the narratives of the Koorie people of Victoria in south-east Australia. In conclusion, the article proposes new legal, policy and professional approaches that support Indigenous frameworks of knowledge, memory and evidence. It also discusses the implications of the findings of the Trust and Technology project for archival theory, practice and education.
Consumer empowerment and the role of the expert patient in their own healthcare, enabled through timely access to quality information, have emerged as significant factors in better health and lifestyle outcomes. Governments, medical researchers, healthcare providers in the public and private sector, drug companies, health consumer groups, and individuals are increasingly looking to the Internet to both access and distribute health information, communicate with each other, and form supportive or collaborative online communities. Evaluating the accuracy, provenance, authority, and reliability of Web-based health information is a major priority. The Breast Cancer Knowledge Online Portal project (BCKOnline) explored the individual and changing information and decision support needs of women with breast cancer and the issues they face when searching for relevant and reliable health information on the Internet. Its user-sensitive research design integrated multidisciplinary methods including user information-needs analysis, knowledge-domain mapping, metadata modeling, and systems-development research techniques. The main outcomes were a personalized information portal driven by a metadata repository of user-sensitive resource descriptions, the BCKOnline Metadata Schema, richer understandings of the concepts of quality, relevance, and reliability, and a user-sensitive design methodology. This article focuses on the innovative, metadata-based quality reporting feature of the BCKOnline Portal, and concludes that it is timely to consider the inclusion of quality elements in resource discovery metadata schema, especially in the health domain.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.