Aboriginal History Archive SA, Collection Audit and Significance Assessment

The Aboriginal History Archive/SA (AHA/SA) is a self-determined, community controlled archive that holds small, historically significant collections generated from within the Aboriginal community in South Australia. A Collection Audit will be undertaken to document and better understand the archive’s contents, informing future digitisation, cataloguing, and the development of case study programming for teaching, research, learning, and community initiatives. This process will enable the archive to be systematically explored, analysed, and evaluated. A Significance Assessment will contextualise the collection and its history, supporting its integration into research, teaching, curriculum development, and future funding opportunities.
This includes analysis of the whole AHA/SA against the Significance 2.0 national assessment guidelines, such as: researching and writing up of the archive's context, history, and development; identifying key themes emerging from the collections within the AHA/SA; comparative analysis with other similar Aboriginal community-led archives; the history/context of each individual collection within the AHA/SA that contributes to the broader history of SA (eg. Key events, Campaigns, Biographies, Stolen Generation movements, etc); and recording/documenting the stories of the people donating the material to the archive.