Museums and Indigenous People in Australia: A Review of Previous Possessions,New Obligations: Policies for Museums in Australia and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples

Previous Possessions, New Obligations was launched by Museums Australia Inc. in 1993, the International Year for the World's Indigenous People, as a policy framework to guide the development of relationships between museums in Australia and Indigenous Australians. The policy was based on consultation with Indigenous people to develop protocols, policies and procedures for more sensitive collection management and for including Indigenous people in research and public programs; and to address issues of governance. It expressed the values that would underpin new relationships between museums in Australia and Indigenous Australians. An evaluation of the policy was conducted in 2000 in a collaboration between the Australian Museum Audience Research Centre, Sydney, and Museums Australia Inc., Canberra. The evaluation found that the policy had substantially met its goals, particularly in establishing the primary rights of Indigenous people to control their cultural material in museum collections. However, a range of substantially new issues emerged which require new policy responses and initiatives.     

The practical power of human rights: how international human rights standards can inform archival and record keeping practices

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is the preeminent international instrument elaborating on the rights of Indigenous peoples. It contains the minimum standards for the survival, dignity and well-being of Indigenous peoples all over the world. As a consequence, the Declaration provides a blueprint for Indigenous peoples, governments and other third parties around the world to respect the rights and roles of Indigenous peoples within society. At its core, the Declaration is based on the principles of self-determination, good faith and participation in decision-making. In this paper, I outline how the principles of the Declaration can and should influence archival and record keeping practices. I suggest we need to harness the practical power of human rights. In exercising our right to participate in decision-making, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples can demonstrate this practical power. It is critical that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are substantive and major stakeholders in determining appropriate archival and record keeping processes for Indigenous culture, cultural property and knowledge.     

Books are silent ambassadors: The Noma award for the translation of Japanese literature

Summary Now more than ever good translations are proving to be vitally important to fulfilling Shoichi Noma’s mission of advancing good relationships between cultures. With the emergence of dozens of world-class Japanese writers, the translators of Japanese literature have acquired a new significance and a new importance. No longer are they required to simply handle the language like an exotic and precious commodity but they must prepare a writer’s work to compete with literature from around the globe and let others understand the issues at their very heart of the Japanese people. Indeed, the selection committee’s choice of Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an apt example of how literature at its very best can span cultural divides to promote mutual understanding of very complicated and important world issues. Written for Japanese to help them understand the devastation of war, it is a rare and timely book that confronts Japan’s experience head on. Ironically, Noma’s idea that books are silent ambassadors, an idea born from agony and defeat, so many years later is helping the world come together towards a unified vision of peace and understanding. “Literature has been described as a means of exchange between the hearts of people. Literary translation, then, is the building of bridges so that all peoples of the world can interact in this way.” Ye Weiqu, Chinese Institute of Social Studies.     

Access to records for people who were in out-of-home care: moving beyond ‘third dimension’ archival practice

A right to preserve one’s culture is recognised in the United Nations human rights treaty system. Individual and collective cultural identity within government and private archives can be enabled through a participatory approach which acknowledges record subjects as record co-creators. This article analyses cultural human rights instruments found in international and domestic Australian laws as warrants for a participatory archive within the Australian context, premised on the recognition of the rights of those who are subjects of the record to add their own narratives to records held in archival institutions, and to participate as co-creators in decision-making about appraisal, access and control, thus shaping and reshaping the archive from their perspective. To this end, it proposes the use of social media to enhance cultural rights and cultural identity. Adopting the principle of rights maximisation, a participatory approach lessens the impact of the right to be forgotten on cultural rights. The article concludes that Australian archival policy makers and jurisdictions which have a human rights regime, have a clear mandate to give priority to the preservation of records of distinctive cultures, in particular those of Indigenous peoples and minorities.     

Territorial Rights and Wrongs

In this short article, Henry Rosenbloom, the founder of Australian independent publisher Scribe, complains about the tactic of UK-based publishers buying ‘Commonwealth’ rights and preventing Australian publishers from acquiring separate Australian rights. ‘UK publishers are not entitled to Australia as a territory. It is our country, our market, and our industry,’ he writes. This article was originally published in The Age newspaper in early 2008, then on Rosenbloom’s blog, and it was the catalyst for a spirited debate at this year’s London Book Fair.     

Digital Publishing in Developing Countries: The Emergence of New Models?

In developing countries, where traditional publishing faces enormous challenges, digital may work as an accelerator that could help local actors to skip a stage and position themselves at a much more advanced level. However, for domestic players to really benefit from the electronic era, it will be essential for them not to adopt systems implanted from outside on an as is basis, but rather to invest in new models better suited for the local people’s expectations and requirements.     

The Establishment of “Rural Bookrooms” in China

In July 2006, the General Administration of Press and Publication of the People’s Public of China hosted a forum entitled “The Support by the National Press and Publishing Industry and the Construction of a New Socialist Country”. Since then, the construction work of Rural Bookrooms has been carried out and thousands of the “Benefit-for-Peasant Libraries”, “Rural Bookrooms” and “New Countryside Libraries”, etc., has been built up in different parts of rural areas and in peasants’ residential sites in urban areas to meet the demand of a large number of the farmers for reading and improve their scientific and cultural quality. Up to now, the building of Rural Bookrooms has become one main part of the cultural construction in China on a countrywide basis. It will be historically significant in improving the peasants’ scientific and cultural development, narrowing the gap between rural and urban areas, maintaining the peasants’ basis right of cultural learning and promoting the modernization of China as a country.     

Indigenous human rights and knowledge in archives, museums, and libraries: some international perspectives with specific reference to New Zealand and Canada

This article highlights the extent to which international law has changed rapidly in recent years in relation to the rights of Indigenous peoples generally and in particular how this impacts upon the legal status of traditional knowledge and culture. It reviews the recognition of the unique legal status of Māori in Aotearoa and Aboriginal peoples in Canada in relation to self-determination and how their changing place within these nations are affecting the operations of museums, libraries, and archives as case studies, illustrating some of the key legal and practical challenges that now impinge upon the work of archivists and related professionals in many countries.     

Indigenous peoples’ human rights and the Victorian Charter: a framework for reorienting recordkeeping and archival practice

This article considers the legal framework for archival and recordkeeping institutions, archivists and recordkeeping professionals in one Australian state under the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Act 2006 (Vic) and the relationship with protection of Indigenous culture. It examines the underlying themes of the Victorian Charter and considers the Charter rights to culture, privacy and family as relevant specifically to Indigenous Victorians, and to those institutions keeping records and archives relating to Indigenous Victorians. Finally, it explains the way the human rights protected by the Charter are enforced, and the role of public institutions as duty bearers under the Charter.     

公共文化服务体系建设中的公共图书馆制度安排——基于文化权利的视角

文化权利作为新一代人权的重要内容,越来越受到人们的关注,构建公共文化服务体系就是为了维护和实现公民的文化权利。公共图书馆作为公共文化服务体系的重要组成部分,在维护和实现公民的文化权利中发挥着重要的作用。     

Excluding Archival Silences: Oral History and Historical Absence

Despite our society’s increasing reliance on electronic documentation, to-date archives remain, largely, material repositories of cultural memory. It is an accepted historical problematic, however, that culture is often resistant to material preservation. There exists an undeniable and profound tension between scholarly efforts to reconstruct history and interpret cultural traditions and the fragmentary, and often limited, material record. That is to say, scholarship is shaped by a sinuous negotiation around the historical silences that encompass all of material culture.Historical silences, however, can at times be marginalized (or at best excluded) by a sensitive configuration of material evidence with oral history. Excluding Archival Silences: Oral History and Historical Absence uses a historically and geographically specific example of oral history to engage in a more generalist discussion of how oral reflection, especially when shaped by material evidences, can be an especially effective tool for preserving the dynamics of culture that often remain undocumented.     

Discovering Indigenous Australian Culture: Building Trusted Engagement in Online Environments

ABSTRACT

Promoting and facilitating access to historical collections for Indigenous communities has recently increased across Australia. Such activities have been integrated into the practices of archives and libraries seeking to reunite Indigenous people with materials that not only document their past but also inform their future. Challenges in accessing these materials go beyond retrieval and include concerns about their emotional content. The State Library of New South Wales is working to create trusted environments for Indigenous peoples and collections with both physical and digital spaces. Through the presentation of work undertaken at the State Library, this article explores how the digital environment can be an effective extension of the physical site in which cultural collections are held. In addition, this article looks at issues that must be addressed to ensure the success and ongoing viability of Web spaces, specifically, the long-standing power dynamics that often dominate interactions with Indigenous collections and that have displaced power from the traditional owners of Indigenous knowledge.     

Editors’ introduction to Keeping cultures alive: Archives and Indigenous human rights

Keeping Cultures Alive investigates the relationship between Indigenous human rights and the archives through an interdisciplinary and comparative lens, bringing together papers by Indigenous and non-Indigenous experts in Indigenous studies, human rights, law and archival science. It explores Indigenous human rights in an international context with particular reference to the implications of the international human rights agenda for current and future archival practice in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.     

NAGPRA: Effective Repatriation Programs and Cultural Change in Museums

A survey of museums in the United States sought to identify evidence of broad impact on the organisational culture and practices of museums in their relatioships with indiginous peoples as a result of the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act 1990 (NAGPRA). NAGPRA establishes a process for the repatriation of human remains and other specified items held in museum collections to Native Americans who can prove they are lineal descendants or members of tribes which are culturally affiliated with identified items covered by the legislation. Effective repatriation programs are characterised by: * a genuine belief in the primary rights of indigenous people in the management of their cultural material presently held in museum collections; * a commitment to greater collaboration between the museum and indigenous people in the management of scientific research and public programs pertaining to items of indigenous cultural heritage; * practices which are indicative of an organisational culture which acts in ways which go beyond the minimum requirements of the legislation. Our research shows that museums are engaging in consultation with indigenous people in the management of collections of indigenous cultural heritage, and that this engagement is influencing conservation strategies. Museums espouse goals which promote external consultation, the involvement of indigenous people in their activities, respect for the cultural goals of indigenous people and a commitment to increasing public awareness of indigenous cultural heritage and social issues. However, only in the areas where NAGPRA has mandated it should happen—collections of human remains and secret/sacred material—is there evidence of communication and consultation, commitment of resources and sharing of authority with indigenous people consistent with the outcomes intended under NAGPRA.     

图书馆公共文化服务在提升居民幸福感方面的重要作用

公共文化服务体系的构建,扩大了政府服务的公益性影响,图书馆在保障居民基本文化权利,实现国民精神满足感,拥有生活"幸福感"方面起到了十分重要的作用。     

Opinion-based entity ranking

The deployment of Web 2.0 technologies has led to rapid growth of various opinions and reviews on the web, such as reviews on products and opinions about people. Such content can be very useful to help people find interesting entities like products, businesses and people based on their individual preferences or tradeoffs. Most existing work on leveraging opinionated content has focused on integrating and summarizing opinions on entities to help users better digest all the opinions. In this paper, we propose a different way of leveraging opinionated content, by directly ranking entities based on a user’s preferences. Our idea is to represent each entity with the text of all the reviews of that entity. Given a user’s keyword query that expresses the desired features of an entity, we can then rank all the candidate entities based on how well opinions on these entities match the user’s preferences. We study several methods for solving this problem, including both standard text retrieval models and some extensions of these models. Experiment results on ranking entities based on opinions in two different domains (hotels and cars) show that the proposed extensions are effective and lead to improvement of ranking accuracy over the standard text retrieval models for this task.     

Cultural Studies and/of Economic Rights: Neglect and Promise

This article theorizes the historical non-relation between cultural studies and economic rights discourse, tracing it to ideal typical distinctions between economy and culture in early cultural studies; Karl Marx's influence on Left thought generally via his critique of bourgeois rights; and Foucauldian governmentalist treatments of rights as neoliberal technologies of control and treatments of economy as having no agency of its own but rather as an effect of governmentality. It then introduces a case-study conjunctural history of American economic rights as a history of present American citizenship and politics in order to demonstrate the historically contingent articulations of individual freedom, government, and economic relations, which are not easily explained by the Marxist or Foucauldian vocabularies. The conjunctural history provides cultural studies research with a new perspective for attention to radical democracy and critiques of neoliberal capitalist policies without surrendering the utility of rights to (neo)liberalism.     

The Global Ranking of the Publishing Industry 2009

More ‘global’, and much more digital than most would expect, the article presents trends and developments of the world’s largest cultural industry as mirrored in its Global Ranking.     

The book as mass commodity: The audience perspective

An examination of the issue of literary massification and degradation of taste in the light of how locally organized reading groups select and respond to books. Although commodification does somewhat narrow the universe of choice for these groups it seems less important in shaping their use of books than are the opinions of cultural authorities or the reader’s own personal experience. Further, the responses of these readers of “good” books resemble in certain ways what is known of reader responses to mass market books, which also undermine a rigid dichotomy between high culture and mass culture.     

Rethinking archival,ethical and legal frameworks for records of Indigenous Australian communities: a participant relationship model of rights and responsibilities

Archival systems have been based on the conventional understanding of the relationship between record subjects as third parties and record creators as the principal parties to the record transaction, thus limiting the rights of those captured in and by the record. An alternative approach is a participant relationship model which acknowledges all parties to a transaction as immediate parties with negotiated rights and responsibilities. A number of legal and archival concepts support a participant model of co-creatorship and associated responsibilities in relation to ownership, access and privacy. The application of the participant model to Indigenous Australian record subjects, in particular to records about them held in archival institutions or in creating organisations would enhance Indigenous rights in records. Indigenous claims to ownership over archival sources of Indigenous knowledge can be characterised in the legal concept of a bundle of rights that recognises more than one interest to control, disclose, access and use records. Human rights principles in international and national human rights instruments also support the assertion of Indigenous rights in records. Archival and legal reform is required to fully implement the participant model but a number of archival, ethical and legal strategies would accelerate its implementation. The re-conceptualisation of the record subject as a record co-creator can also be applied to non-Indigenous contexts and therefore has significant archival and legal implications.