Professor Eric Ketelaar and Dr Livia Iacovino.
The Australian Research Council Linkage project, "Trust and Technology: Building Archival Systems for Indigenous Oral Memory", identified a number of legal and archival obstacles to Australian Indigenous rights in records, in particular limitations on ownership rights for people who are considered to be the subject of records. The Project highlighted areas for further exploration within a participant relationship model which repositions Indigenous communities and individuals as record co-creators. The Jean Whyte project examined how Indigenous claims to ownership over archival sources of Indigenous knowledge could be characterised in the legal concept of a bundle of rights that recognises more than one interest to control, disclose, access and use records; identified legal and archival concepts that supported a participatory model of co-creatorship and associated responsibilities in relation to ownership, access and privacy; recommended archival and legal reform required to implement the model; located human rights principles in international and national human rights instruments that support the assertion of Indigenous rights in records; and proposed a range of archival, policy and legal strategies that could be adopted to further collective and individual Indigenous rights in records.
Preliminary findings were presented at the Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics Research Forum: Human Rights and Indigenous Archives, 7 August 2009.
A major outcome of the Project is the Exposure Draft Position Statement: Human Rights, Indigenous Communities in Australia and the Archives October 2009
Related refereed journal article: Livia Iacovino. Rethinking archival, ethical and legal frameworks for records of Indigenous Australian communities: a participant relationship model of rights and responsibilities. Archival Science, DOI 10.1007/s10502-010-9120-3, Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010, Published online June 2010 http://www.springerlink.com/content/1804630j036t7m11/fulltext.pdf