Victorian Collections
Victorian Collections (VC) is a free, web-based collection management system designed for community collecting organisations. The online system is supported by a suite of training opportunities provided by the Victorian Collections team across metropolitan and regional Victoria. The project is funded by Victorian Government and the Victorian Cultural Network through Creative Victoria.
The VC platform is as a gateway to Victoria’s rich and diverse heritage, providing access to a growing array of stories, collections, education kits, and much more.
THE PROGRAM IN 2024
Organisations and cataloguers across Victoria demonstrated their continued commitment to preserving and sharing the state’s heritage throughout 2024. A total of 125,495 items were added to Victorian Collections, bringing the overall number of catalogued items to 499,034 — with over 370,000 publicly accessible. This extraordinary milestone more than doubles the number catalogued in 2023, thanks in part to the short-term Distributed Collections Digital Migration Project, which supported organisations migrating to the platform.
The VC community has continued to grow, with new contributors including museums, historical societies, heritage sites, libraries, RSLs, schools, and sporting clubs, as well as medical, nursing, community service, conservation, multicultural, and arts organisations.
The VC team delivered 17 online and in-person workshops throughout the year, covering introductory and advanced cataloguing, collections digitisation, and considerations for making collections accessible. In 2024, the team also developed and introduced a new workshop on Advanced Digitisation, and delivered two workshops as part of AMaGA Victoria’s On Demand training program. Notably, the team travelled 4,138kms across the state to deliver workshops and conduct 22 site visits to contributing organisations, providing targeted advice on the CMS, story development, and preparation for bulk data migration.
Workshops were attended by 139 cataloguers from 93 organisations, 33% of which were based in regional Victoria. This high level of participation in VC’s workshop offering demonstrates the continued success of offering both in-person and online training options for the VC Community.
The team also commenced early scoping and research to develop a plan for a long-term staged project to improve the Cultural Safety of Victorian Collections for First Peoples. This preliminary pre-project stage has involved engaging Boonwurrung consultant Caroline Martin to inform the direction of the developed project plan. The team are excited to continue development of the plan with a view to identifying suitable funding to deliver the long-term project.
Image: Workshop attendees diligently practicing cataloguing using the VC CMS. Photo: Amelia Marra.
VC’s Program Manager Jackie Fraser was also thrilled to join fellow collections custodians, GLAM sector members, and historical society representatives as an invited speaker at the 2024 Association of Eastern Historical Societies conference. Drawing on the VC team’s experiences as administrators of the program, Jackie’s presentation encouraged attendees to broaden their understanding of the value of their collections and to explore the benefits of sharing collections online.
Image: Support Officer Geraldine Brault setting up lights for digitisation training Photo: Amelia Marra.
DIGITAL MIGRATION PROJECT
In mid-2024, the VC team commenced a 12-month project to address unprecedented demand from organisations interested in bulk migration of their collection data to the CMS.
Working directly with approximately 50 organisations that had expressed interest in migrating, the project aims to understand their current migration progress and goals, and seeks to develop robust information, systems, and structures for VC’s migration service. These outcomes will in turn enable the VC team to provide the necessary support for organisations undertaking data migration to Victorian Collections in an ongoing and sustainable manner.
The first six months of the project resulted in the majority of organisations being contacted, and the VC team able to accurately identify the varying statuses of these organisations within the data migration process.
With direct support beginning soon after the project commenced, by December 2024 four organisations had completed their migration, contributing to a total of 54,531 items added to Victorian Collections.
JACKIE FRASER
Program Manager, Victorian Collections