An Open Letter to the Queensland State Archives, 21 December 2019
To Whom it Concerns
Today, 21 December 2019 I saw the Q-Album website. Let me be clear at the outset. It is an excellent project. There are no copyright infringements made. There are no legal complaints. Rather the reason why I am writing publicly is to say that you have deeply hurt me without any acknowledgement made to the work of myself and Ryan Jones in the development of the Mapping Brisbane History website. It is not about the Q-Album website. I was never made aware of the project, even though once I was contracted by the QSA. It is about institutional silence on the work of private history consultancies when a public institution creates a competitive edge over that work, and yet not inviting work collaboratively with private history consultancies (those with the most demonstrated expertise) to achieve the particular end. The Mapping Brisbane History Project was unique in Australia for some years. It has achieved an excellence in the scholarship of digital history mapping where, unfortunately, too few have acknowledged. The history concept and design of data structure in Q-Album is too suspiciously copied from the Mapping Brisbane History website. It is not a legal issue. It is an ethical issue around scholarly and institutional acknowledgement.
You have hurt me as a professional historian without ethical acknowledgement. It is not much to ask for, in the minds of many, but for those of us who are struggling to find income as professional historians in a marketplace that does not want to pay for public history (and yet demanded by neo-liberal economic policies), it is fundamentally important.
