Manning Clark House Award, 2006

The Australian Dictionary of Biography Online won the Manning Clark House National Cultural Award (Group Category) in 2006 for its outstanding contribution to the quality of Australian cultural life.

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The Australian National University’s Australian Dictionary of Biography unit has now published seventeen volumes containing some 10,000 biographies of 11,237 eminent and representative Australians who died before 1981. The unit, the project itself, is a national treasure.

In recent months the ADB has expanded its unique contribution to 'the quality of Australian cultural life' with the launch, on 6 July 2006, of the ADB Online, an extraordinary additional resource for researching and teaching, and learning about, Australian history.

The ADB Online is an electronic edition of the print volumes of the ADB. The original eight million words of text are now freely available on the Internet as a searchable database. But this new initiative is more than simply an electronic new addition to the broad field of Australian history because a facility for structured and free-text searches has been incorporated - with links to other databases established by the major cultural institutions. With minimal effort, investigators can find ADB subjects who share attributes or combinations of attributes vital to more detailed historical analysis. PictureAustralia is just one example of a number of key databases to which ADB Online is linked.

The word is out.  Since the launch of ADB Online in July, the website has received over 12 million hits and 5 million page visits. Australia’s immense geography (and for some, the sense of isolation the country’s distances can inflict) is no longer an issue. ADB Online is indeed a 'gift to the nation', making a vast amount of our most significant history and historical analysis 'accessible as never before'.

December 2006