Wagga Wagga Women's Wireless and the Web: local studies and new technologies.(Wagga Wagga City Library's use of the Internet to record the history of Radio Station 2WG's Women's Club)(Report)

The coming of the Web and the ease with which on-line history projects can be established has seen a wave of popular history websites that encourage personal reflections on an organisation or event from anyone with an opinion. This paper looks at one such project, established by Wagga Wagga City Library, to record memories of Radio Station 2WG's Women's Club which flourished in the Riverina area from the 1930s to the early 1960s, providing a valuable information and entertainment resource to this rural and regional community.

Remembering the past

Traditionally, the past is remembered in many ways. Jimerson (2003, p. 89) talks of four separate but intersecting approaches--collective or social memory, historical memory, archival memory and personal memory, Collective memory, often based on myths or simplistic interpretations of events serves to shape and enshrine the identity of social groups; historical memory takes a more disciplined, evidence based approach in seeking to interpret the past, and archival memory relies upon documents and records to provide the basic resources for historical interpretation. Personal memory comprises individuals' memories and interpretation of events. Such memories, complete with the person's biases, narrow focus and individual understanding of events makes them a rich source for understanding how these events impacted on individual lives while at the same time making them suspect as sources for historical 'truths'.

The first three memories described by Jimerson involve the mediation of trusted experts--historians and cultural institutions whose job it is to decide what gets preserved, what is ignored; what is included, what excluded, from the historical canon associated with a particular event. Thus collections of material are formed and retained for various periods depending upon rules and guidelines (interpreted by individual employees) associated with the goals and objectives of particular institutions In addition, this material, when accessed by researchers and used to create histories is interpreted and edited by the stakeholders--authors, curators, publishers, institutions inevitably reflecting their own interests, biases and concerns, before being repackaged and presented to the public, This need to select and edit has been a response to the very practical issue of finite resources that limit both the production and acquisition of material and its longer term preservation.

Popular histories and the Web

With the advent of the Internet, the falling costs of computer storage and a growing acceptance of online resources with no print equivalents, real possibilities for greatly increasing the amount of material being acquired by libraries and archives and preserved over the longer term have arisen, And while digital preservation is a challenging process for-the library and archive community, it is determining strategies and techniques that create the difficulties, not necessarily the volume of data involved. This then opens up the potential for institutions to readily acquire and preserve a wide range of digital objects that add considerably to the depth and extent of their traditional holdings. While resources in the past may have limited the collection of physical items to materials sanctioned in some way as adding to the archival or historical memory, the potential of the digital realm to enable acquisition of personal memories on a large scale across a broad spectrum is very real indeed.

For collecting institutions there is potential for exploiting the Web 2.0 philosophy of user involvement in creating and adding to collections, bolstering that fourth dimension, personal memory, which has in the past tended to receive limited attention.