The eScholarship Research Centre: working with knowledge in the twenty-first century

The eScholarship Research Centre at the University of Melbourne was established in 2007 but its origins can be traced back to the foundation of the Australian Science Archives Project in 1985. In its 2015 review, the Centre stated its four key activities as engagement, scholarly services, research and collaboration. What identified the Centre as different from other research centres was that it was not located in a faculty but within the University Library. At the same time, the Centre was different from the other units of the Library because it maintained its largely self-funded business model and its commitment to helping build national information infrastructure to support research. So while most of the Library was inward looking to support the specific needs of staff and students of the University, the Centre had a tradition of looking outwards, collaborating beyond the borders of the campus and seeking out colleagues with similar goals across the globe. What started as a national information infrastructure project to support the study of the history of Australian science and technology became a research programme in its own right, as the rampant development of digital technologies started the radical transformation of the information landscape. The emergence of social and cultural informatics as a discipline provided the intellectual backdrop for the research agenda for the Centre, with its strengths in archival science and over-arching interests in the challenges of intergenerational transfer of knowledge.