In late 2022, the State Library of South Australia (SLSA) acquired a small but significant group of children's records from the United Aborigines’ Mission (UAM) Archive, Melbourne, an interdenominational mission organisation established in New South Wales in 1895, which ran missions, hostels, and children’s homes across the country, particularly in South Australia. The Bringing Them Home Report (1997) named UAM as an institution that housed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children removed from their families; the UAM was wound up in 2021. This paper offers a case study, where we describe the historical background of UAM, and trace the history of the UAM archive, including its breakup and the supposed loss to flood in 2019, together with the circumstances of the recent acquisition by SLSA. We describe the main challenges – and successes – we faced in different aspects relating to care and management of these records: from acquisition methods, through description and consultation, to engagement and access (incl. healing, redress, and reparations requests etc). Significant work remains to be done. But central to our effort is the principle of self-determination: Indigenous representation and consultation must be at the forefront of our acquisition and management processes. We aim to raise awareness about the records, by working with community as partners, to ensure better access to the records, to support knowing, truth telling and, ultimately, healing.

Central Australian Aboriginal Men's Collection Digitisation Project. The NFSA has developed an unique Indigenous Traditional Owner-led model to digitally preserve the film and audio from the Strehlow Collection, one of the most important ethnographic collections relating to Indigenous ceremonial life found anywhere in the world.  Most of this material relates to \'men\'s-only\' sacred and secret ceremonies so core to this project was the development of a set of Indigenous Cultural Intellectual Property protocols to ensure the strict handling and safety of the material. The Strehlow Collection is based around the field work of Professor TGH Strehlow, who spent more than four decades recording the ceremonial customs and traditions of Central Australian Aboriginal Communities from 1932 through to the mid-1970. The collection consists of over 400 reels of 16mm film and audio recordings including over 1000 reels of magnetic tape and wire recordings representing over 800 ceremonial acts and 150 hours of audio recordings of stories and songs. The digital preservation of this collection is vital for the continued cultural maintenance of Central Australian Aboriginal communities and the revitalisation of cultural practices and traditional language. A key component of this project was to build a digital archive and studio in Alice Springs at the Strehlow Research Centre to provide its Indigenous Traditional Owners with unprecedented access to these unique recordings of their cultural heritage on country and ensure it is preserved for future generations.

Nyingarn is a project that gives access to Indigenous language manuscripts. These manuscripts can be hard to get as they are often held in state and national institutions, some distance from the speakers of the languages. Some are written in handwriting, which is difficult to read. The Nyingarn project is converting these manuscripts to text using tools like Optical Character Recognition (OCR), dramatically reducing the workflow for communities doing language revitalisation. With appropriate permissions, manuscript images are transcribed, which makes them searchable and usable. Over time, Nyingarn will be the place to search for early Australian indigenous language records. Our presentation will demonstrate the key capabilities of Nyingarn and explain how we are working as a team to uncover more manuscripts.