PRESERVING AUSTRALIA'S SOUND HERITAGE (PASH)

In 2003, Emeritus Professor David Tunley and Dr Victoria Rogers (the then Director of the Callaway Centre) were successful in attracting funding through the Australian Research Council's (ARC) Linkage Infrastructure Projects to undertake work in collating, cataloguing and digitising the archive's Handa Collection, a significant Australian music collection that was donated to The University of Western Australia by the Japanese philanthropist, Dr Haruhisa Handa. The PASH project aims to bring greater recognition to Australia's sound heritage, to foster Australian music research through the development of the collection, and to enable Australia-wide and international web-based access to these resources through the Callaway Centre Archive's online catalogue and the National Library of Australia's MusicAustralia service.

The Handa Collection contains over 150,000 items, representing a wide range of Australian music genres over the past 100 years. Of these, over half are sound carriers in the form of cylinders, radio discs and 78s. These materials were assiduously gathered over many years by Australian collector, Peter Burgis. A selection of the sound carriers, many of which are unique, have been transferred to digital format and are now available online.

Extensive work has been undertaken in developing the database infrastructure for the project, in cataloguing a large selection of sound recordings, and in completing the digital transfer of many of these items.

Acknowledgements

This infrastructure was established through funding provided by the Australian Research Council's Linkage Infrastructure Projects (project number LEO 668458 - Sound Footings: creating a web-based research infrastructure of major music archives) and The University of Western Australia's Research Matching Fund. Further support and expertise were provided by the National Library of Australia, the National Film & Sound Archive and the library at The University of Western Australia. The Chief Investigators acknowledge and thank the ARC, The University of Western Australia, the National Film & Sound Archive and the National Library of Australia for their support.

Further Information

Handa Collection

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