This session will focus on the evaluation of strategies to document the public health crises, including AIDS, opioid overdose, COVID-19, and others through co-designing archives in partnership with affected communities.
This work brings to the forefront a challenge archives routinely face: the urgent need to preserve a wide variety of primary sources and supplemental materials that will allow community members, scientists, and historians to conduct research and create a comprehensive account of critical public health crises. These primary sources should facilitate the creation of a historical narrative that incorporates all of those impacted: clinicians, researchers, patients, and the community, and allows for the examination of all facets of public health crises: political, social, economic, cultural, and biomedical. The co-design efforts aim to address “silences” and gaps that exist in the narratives. The idea for participatory archives was born from a community-identified need to preserve and share the histories of strength and perseverance, despite significant and ongoing structural barriers. This session will discuss projects that created partnerships between academic/traditional archives and affected communities to collect and describe primary sources generated by communities and under-represented groups in the course of advocacy, prevention, harm reduction, and other activities to co-design an inclusive historical record and expand its social and health justice impact. The outcomes of these partnership projects include publicly accessible educational materials and piloted models for community archival co-design that can be replicated in relation to other public health crises, and other community health and welfare concerns.

Dr Ana Margarida Silva
Department of Life Sciences of the University of Coimbra (Portugal)

With the aim to collect data and sources on Croatian technology heritage as well as to its positioning in the global context, a large national project − Croatian Encyclopedia of Technology is underway, involving the widest technological and scientific community. One of the goals of the project is to familiarise the domestic and international public, including students, scientists, and professionals, with the technology heritage in Croatia. The project relies on the values of the traditional encyclopedic concept of organisation and dissemination of consolidated and verified knowledge, adapted to the digital age and the contemporary cultural and scientific context. Using the advantages of digital media and the principles of open science, the goal of the project is also to provide a platform for further research in the field, in which an interdisciplinary, multilayered, and complex approach is necessary. With this intent, the open access Portal of the Croatian Technology Heritage was launched in 2018 (tehnika.lzmk.hr). The Portal acts as the database connecting Encyclopedia with related content from various reliable and relevant sources of knowledge – bibliographic records, museum artifacts and collections, archives etc., thus enabling knowledge exchange and networking with digital repositories of cultural and research insitutions. Furthermore, the Atlas of the Croatian Technology Heritage (tehnika.lzmk.hr/atlas/) was launched in 2023 as a new functionality of the Portal, with the aim to connect the vast collected knowledge with space, and thus enable users to get to know their surroundings as well as to visit places important for the development of technology.

The data and the data structures that underpin the "Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation" (https://eoas.info/) has been under continuous evolution since its beginnings in 1985 when it was established as a core activity of the Australian Science Archives Project (1985-1999). Since its move to Swinburne University of Technology in 2021 and its rebranding, and through the dedication of the volunteer data curation team, the scale, quality and depth of content has increased substantially. New editions are published every three months, and it is anticipated that by the ICHST there will be over 10,000 entity entries and 28,000 bibliographic entries. This presentation will re-introduce the Encyclopedia and examine, by way of examples, its evolution. The examples will be chosen to highlight the relative silence of entries with respect to Australian First Nations' knowledge and knowledge systems. The original focus of the encyclopedia was to assist historians of science find relevant archival collections documenting western science in Australia buried in the distributed and unconnected collections held across the country. The entries were unintentionally silent on the impact of western science on Australian First Nations and perpetuated the "systemic forgetting" that WEH Stanner brought to the Australian consciousness in 1967. The formal registering of Australian Frist Nations ' knowledge and ways of transferring knowledge across generations had not been attempted. In addition, the impact of the actions of Australian First Nations on the trajectory of science in Australia was not consciously addressed. In the spirit of 'truth telling', this is our challenge.

This paper examines the scholarly framing and analysis of a specific trans-continental archive, the Vyas-Weisz collection, which has been generally understood as a scientific corpus. This manuscript cache was only partially catalogued by David Pingree, and his notes and handlist of this material remain incomplete. Based on his work, this trove of manuscripts has been characterized in scholarly literature as a primarily scientific archive, comprising largely mathematics, astronomy, astrology, and related areas, and as having once belonged to a family of traditional astrologers. This paper proceeds from a first-hand examination of the contents of this still uncurated archive, which seeks to reorient its reception, and in the process, raises several unanswered questions and opens new lines of inquiry. As the curated library collection of a multigenerational family of scholars and scribes from the late medieval to the early modern period, the archive presents empirical evidence for intriguing insights into an interconnected, far-flung and enduring manuscript economy and intellectual network. Besides immediate questions around the contents of the manuscripts themselves and those of nomenclature and classification, I discuss issues around scribal practice, the circulation of manuscripts, and the preservation of evidentiary information not directly linked with the manuscript contents but intimately connected with the material life of these manuscripts. I then draw some tentative connections between the contents of two far-flung manuscript archives to suggest that in late 19th century South Asia, there still functioned a well-established supply chain network that fueled a still thriving manuscript economy around indigenous scientific cultures.