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About the site

This website is a collaborative project by the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House and the National Archives of Australia.

The Mildenhall Collection of photographs documents the early development of Australia’s capital city, Canberra, from the 1920s to the 1930s. The collection comprises more than 7,700 images on glass plate negatives and has significant cultural and historical value to Australians.

The aim is to use the Mildenhall Collection to communicate the significance of Old Parliament House and explore Canberra’s early development as the national capital. We particularly want people to actively engage with the collection by:

  • using geodata to locate the images
  • commenting on images to add stories and provide additional information
  • re-photographing images from the collection

We hope that the accumulation of this information from now until 2013 will do two things. First, it will add to our knowledge about the Mildenhall Collection and create a rich collection dataset of lasting value; and second, it will constitute a significant contribution to the Centenary of Canberra celebrations in 2013.

At the end of the project during 2013, the data that has been harvested for this project, from the National Archives of Australia’s RecordSearch and contributed under creative commons licence, will be added to data.gov.au. The data.gov.au website provides an easy way to find, access and reuse public datasets from the Australian Government and state and territory governments. Its main purpose is to encourage public access to and reuse of government data by providing it in useful formats and under open licences. It was created following the Government’s Declaration of Open Government and response to the Government 2.0 Taskforce.

Photographs in the Mildenhall collection can also be accessed using the National Archives of Australia’s PhotoSearch. PhotoSearch allows you to search an online image bank of more than 220,000 photographs that have been digitised from the National Archives collection.