NEW RESOURCES FOR LABOUR HISTORY

ATUA: Australian Trade Union Archives on the Web

Bruce Smith

On 14 December 1994, Martin Ferguson, then President of the ACTU, launched Parties to the Award,1 a publication of the Noel Butlin Archives Centre at the Australian National University. The publication was a guide to the pedigrees and archival resources of federally registered trade unions, employer bodies and their respective peak associations up to that time. A number of peak bodies that were not registered but which completed the picture of Parties were also included. The year 1994 was seen as significant as it marked the ninetieth anniversary of the passage of the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Act and the commencement of the registration process at the federal level. The first union to be registered was the Merchant Services Guild of Australasia in 1905.	1
The publication provided readers with background information on the federal industrial system including 42 'pedigree' charts of the 900 plus bodies represented, and 100 pages listing these bodies. Additional information such as registration and deregistration dates, date of amalgamation with other bodies and the location (ie holding institution) of known archival holdings is also shown. The information in the pedigree charts has been of considerable value as publication of Parties followed the massive number of union amalgamations of the early 1990s.	2
In the years following publication of Parties there has been an increase in interest in trade union archives by a wide range of researchers. Additionally, archival institutions have expanded on their holdings of archives of trade unions and employer bodies. In 2000 the two major repositories of trade union archives—the Noel Butlin Archives Centre and the University of Melbourne Archives—began a process of looking at developing a joint finding aid based on Parties that could be made available via the World Wide Web. To this end the two institutions formed a partnership with the University of Wollongong Archives, the School of Information Management Systems at Monash University, and the Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre at the University of Melbourne. Together they applied for Australian Research Council funding under the Research Infrastructure (Equipment and Facilities) program for a project to produce a gateway to trade union records. In late 2000 the partners were advised that their application had been successful.	3
Work on the project, to be called Australian Trade Union Archives (ATUA), commenced in early 2001. The initial task was to convert the data in Parties into a format that could be incorporated into the database tools that were to be used for the project. The two tools were the Online Heritage Resource Manager and the Web Academic Resources Publisher.2 Both of these tools were developed by the Australian Science and Technology Heritage Resource Centre. The 'pedigree' charts posed a problem and a process was devised to convert them to image maps that could be linked to the individual database record of each body in Parties .	4
Essentially, the project was to take the data from Parties and enhance it by adding, where possible, a paragraph or two about a union's history, and, where amalgamations had taken place, links were to be made between the respective union and its predecessor and/or successor union. In addition, a short description of the archival holdings was to be linked to the respective union. Finally, known published resources about a union were to be included and linked to the union. It is believed that this was the first time that information on the archival and published resources about a union or employer body had been linked and made available to researchers. The final website is not like websites about trade union archives found overseas.3 It focuses on the bodies that created the records in the first place and provides some context to their function and role in the Australian labour scene. The fact that the body can be linked to information about the archives and their whereabouts, plus information on published resources, provides researchers with a 'one stop shop'.	5
As the project proceeded it became clear that to get greater value from the existing data it was important to provide information about additional sources. It was felt that not only those bodies included in Parties should be covered, but, where appropriate, unions that had only been state registered, and individuals who had personal papers in recognised archival collections, should also be incorporated.	6
Writing about the project, Ross Elford indicated that: ATUA will be, first and foremost, a comprehensive guide for researchers seeking specific archival information relating to trade unions, employer bodies and other notable entities, including some individuals, within the labour movement. It will detail, for instance, where records from the VTHC to the (where known) more obscure Australian Baby Carriage & Wicker Workers' Association are held, listing exactly what records are held, what access conditions apply, and so on.4	7
It is anticipated that researchers will come to see ATUA as a prime tool to locate the archives of trade unions and employer bodies as part of their research endeavours. It is also hoped that funds can be found to update the information in ATUA as archives are deposited in recognised archival institutions, new histories are published or as any amalgamations and de-amalgamations occur. In the short term ATUA provides researchers with access to information on over 1,300 trade union and employer bodies, 175 individuals, 1,400 archival holdings and 500 published resources.	8
As well as providing access to information on trade unions and employer bodies and their known archival and published resources, the project team tested and implemented emerging international and Australian standards for archival metadata, description of archives, resource discovery and the publication of that data on the World Wide Web.	9
ATUA was launched early in 2002 and is available at the following URL: http://www.atua.org.au	10
Endnotes 1 Raj Jadeja (ed.), Parties to the Award: A Guide to the Pedigrees and Archival resources of Federally Registered Trade Unions, Employer Associations & their Peak Council in Australia 1904-1994 , Noel Butlin Archives Centre, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1994. 2 Information on these software tools can be found at http://www.austehc.unimelb.edu.au. 3 Examples of overseas guides to trade union archives include: Canada: Directory of archives with holdings relating to labour [http://www.cdncouncilarchives.ca/cca_dir/labour.html]; Reference Sources in US Labor Studies [http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/tam/resources/] 4Ross Elford, 'Australian Trade Union Archives: RIEF Project gives web access', Trade Union Records vol 2, no. 1, August 2001, p. 4.

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