The painstaking work has so far identified and catalogued hundreds of thousands of datapoints from doctoral theses to biological material to artwork and other items.
A multidisciplinary team of specialist researchers and data architects and analysts has developed a world-leading online Indigenous Metadata Catalogue to identify, preserve and present Indigenous-related research across ANU.
Amid growing global awareness of the need for institutional transparency, cultural sensitivity, and accountability in Indigenous data governance, the University’s Indigenous Data Initiative (IDI) was established in 2019. IDI was set up to answer urgent questions about how ANU should identify, care for, and make available and repatriate Indigenous data that it holds. IDI is also a partner in the Indigenous Data Network established in 2017 at the University of Melbourne.
Housed within the University’s First Nations Portfolio, the IDI team set out to locate all content related to Indigenous research across fragmented ANU information systems. In collaboration with technical partner KurrawongAI, IDI then began building a complex digital catalogue to support technical interoperability alongside ethical responsibility. The goal was to uphold the rights of Indigenous peoples to know and make decisions about Indigenous data collected and held by the university.
Because university research data is usually fragmented across systems owned by different colleges, schools and centres, the IDI team has faced challenges in its quest to find and centralise Indigenous data.
Ethical imperative
The team began by mapping the University’s data landscape by identifying “resources related to Indigenous peoples, cultures, languages, and places” and then integrating multiple siloed repositories into a single cohesive collection. The painstaking work has so far identified and catalogued hundreds of thousands of datapoints from doctoral theses to biological material to artwork and other items.
This treasure hunting has involved IDI researchers working closely with various libraries, colleges and repositories across the University to identify and catalogue data while prioritising cultural sensitivity. Then the verified data is added to a sophisticated custom-built database known as the Indigenous Metadata Catalogue.
The IDI catalogue converts internal ANU repository metadata into a machine-readable Resource Description Framework (RDF).
The catalogue is the result of collaboration across various ANU units as well as the University of Melbourne, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), and the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) through the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences and Indigenous Research Data Commons.
The IDI team are careful to prioritise the fundamental rights of Indigenous Peoples to own and control data across the entire data lifecycle. This includes collection, management, access, interpretation, dissemination and reuse.
The IDI catalogue represents a first step in a longer process to find, connect, and make queryable all ANU Indigenous research data to drive more accountable and responsive data governance.
Raking through repositories
One of the main challenges was that many ANU repositories simply did not identify Indigenous items. The IDI team began working closely with major repositories, painstakingly identifying and integrating Indigenous metadata items one by one.
As of June 2026, these include:
- ANU Academic Research and Information Enterprise System (ARIES): containing metadata for all publications authored by ANU academics.
- ANU Theses Collection: comprising doctoral theses submitted and awarded at ANU.
- ANU Library: bibliographic records for both physical and digital holdings across the university’s library system.
- Briscoe-Smith Archive: an archival research collection containing data generated over the careers of two ANU researchers who made extensive contributions to Australian Indigenous history, demography, and epidemiology.
- Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR): metadata for publications related Indigenous economic development dating back to 1990.
- POLIS: The Centre for Social Policy and Research: publication outputs and theses.
- ANU Open Research Repository: a variety of open access publications including journal articles; books and book chapters; conference papers, posters and presentations; theses; creative works; photographs; and university calendars in a number of collections and formats.
- ANU Compendium of Indigenous Research: a compendium of ANU academics actively involved in Indigenous research from 2010-2018.
- ANU Australasian Pollen and Spore Atlas: the largest collection of pollen and spore samples in the Australian region, representing more than 15,000 species.
Collecting, protecting and reaching out
Future development of the catalogue will include further enrichment through integration with ANU Collections metadata records for anthropological, archaeological, natural history, and other physical cultural heritage objects.
There are also a number of theses currently under embargo that raise governance considerations around access and whether the metadata should be made available to Indigenous communities prior to public theses release.
The IDI Catalogue is a rigorously designed and tested institutional-scale Linked Data product. It both protects and preserves Indigenous data. It includes information about the language groups and place names of the Traditional Owners using rerference datasets including:
- 1,200 languages
- 7,200 locations
- National Heritage Datasets
- the National Heritage List
- the Commonwealth Heritage List
- the Register of the National Estate.
The Catalogue attempts to resolve the tension between restricting access to specific and appropriate Traditional Owners while ensuring a comprehensive and searchable database that is also useful to wider audiences.
While negotiating questions of data ownership and access by reaching out to Traditional Owners, the IDI team continues to identify, preserve, and protect more Indigenous data from across ANU. The team is eager to hear from data owners who may hold Indigenous data that can be integrated into the growing Catalogue in culturally appropriate ways. This has led to inevitable gaps between what the Catalogue contains and what it can display.
The IDI team is now beginning to reach out to Traditional Owners to make them aware that their data exists in the Catalogue and to find out how they would like to make it available, if at all.
This is complex cultural work that requires extreme care and respect for Indigenous peoples who own the data. As such, online access to the catalogue is currently restricted pending the full development and implementation of an Indigenous-led governance arrangement for the catalogue.
If your University business unit holds repositories of Indigenous or potentially Indigenous data, contact the IDI team at First Nations Portfolio: firstnations@anu.edu.au.
This data treasure-hunting has involved IDI researchers working closely with various libraries, colleges and repositories across the University to identify and catalogue data while prioritising cultural sensitivity. Then the verified data is added to a sophisticated custom-built database known as theIndigenous Metadata Catalogue.
