Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre

The Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre (Austehc), lasted from 1999 to 2006,[1] was a non-profit organisation that received the majority of its funding from collaborative works with the government and industry groups.

[3] From 1985 to 1992, approximately 36% of ASAP published works were archival guides, 21% were conference papers, client reports and newsletters each took up 19% of the total publications, and 5% were journal articles.

[3] Although the Australian Science Archives Project was able to develop their digital tools and adapt to the impact of the World Wide Web, they also had to face several challenges.

[4][7] Austehc also began teaching the second and third year students in an art subject called 'Fact, Fiction, and Fraud in the Digital Age' for Melbourne University.

[3] Bright Sparc was an online register where users could find the work and bibliographic resources of people who contributed to the development of Australian's science, technology, engineering, and medicine.

[6] After these two projects coexisted independently for 10 years, they eventually amalgamated in February 2010, establishing the Encyclopedia of Australian Science under the jurisdiction of the eScholarship Research Centre.

To accomplish their mission, Austehc became a Web publisher to help develop the international archive and heritage community as well as a research centre to investigate and verify historical informatics.

[2] Austehc Web was able to provide a wide variety of resources that could be easily accessed by people of different levels, ranging from primary school materials to PhD documentations.

They started teaching an undergraduate course, Fact, Fiction and Fraud in the Digital Age, and supervised several post-graduate projects relating the history of Australian Science and Technology by using and providing documentation.

[2] Their project, Bright Sparc, performed well with over 4,000 registries of individuals who contributed to Australian science, including women, who were neglected throughout the history.

[4] Austehc also managed to compile almost 5,000 citations into a comprehensive bibliography to allow users to develop better understanding towards most of the documentations stored in the Web.

[3] However, building upon the achievements and progression of the Austehc and ASAP, they managed to develop several external projects that acted as their funding source, which allowed them to barely survive past this crisis.

[8] As mentioned above, they had originally wanted to make Bright Sparc and Australian Science at Work one project but due to the technological difficulty for that time, they were unable to achieve this.

[3] 32% were archival guides, 28% were conference papers, 21% were journal articles, web resources took up 9%, client reports and books were 4% each, and others were 2% of the total publications.