The Open Resource Scholarly Network: a new era for historians, archivists and technologists

Abstract

Since 1985 the staff of the Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre (Austehc) have been collecting and disseminating information about the history of Australian science, technology and medicine including data about archival resources on the presumption that scholarly practice, including the creation of new knowledge, was based on free access to, and the citability of, existing knowledge. The advent of electronic network technologies has enable us to realise our goals in ways that were not even dreams in the earlier environment. However, not all players in the scholarly information and publishing realms have responded in the same way. Despite these new technologies, which should be making resources much more readily accessible, many valuable resources are locked up (discoverable perhaps but uncitable) behind closed database walls or are available only on a user pays basis. In many cases these resources were previously available freely through research libraries. Austehc has spent the last few years developing database driven Web publishing tools to support an open resource scholarly electronic network. These tools are being offered to the community at no cost, under the open source philosophy, if they are used for public good and education purposes. These tools, the "Online Heritage Resource Manager" (OHRM) and the "Web Academic Resource Publisher" (WARP) will be presented to this meeting.