It began as a project begun in the 1970s at the University of Sydney under the leadership of Bernard Smith, then called Dictionary of Australian Artists (DAA), and was continued after his retirement in 1981 by Joan Kerr.
In both cases publishers indicated that the small size of the Australian book market meant that scholarly publications of this nature were no longer a viable financial proposition.
Mendelssohn's writing students had begun to publish their work online in a (now defunct) blog entitled Artwrite and she was only too aware of the lack of reliable scholarly material on Australian art on the web.
Mendelssohn enlisted the support of University of New South Wales (UNSW) librarian Andrew Wells[3] and Neil Brown, the COFA Associate Dean of Research.
Before she died on 22 February 2004, she knew that a national partnership of universities, art galleries, and libraries was in the process of applying for funding to create the Dictionary of Australian Artists Online (DAAO).
[2] Johnson, with the assistance of Tess Allas and Laura Fisher, also added an extensive database of Aboriginal biographies created as a part of her Storylines project, a three-year ARC-funded survey of "non-remote" Indigenous artists undertaken from 2007 to 2009.