When the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) was looking to upgrade the network connectivity for its headquarters in Canberra a decade and a half ago, it turned to AARNet, Australia’s national research and education network, for assistance.

AIATSIS is Australia’s national research institution dedicated to the study and preservation of the culture, heritage, and history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The Institute conducts research in linguistics, history, Indigenous land and water rights, cultural heritage, human rights, international Indigenous rights, and cultural studies, focusing on the cultural and linguistic diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

AIATSIS also houses a significant collection of Indigenous cultural materials, including archives, manuscripts, photographs, audio-visual recordings, and art. These collections are made accessible to communities, land rights practitioners, researchers, policymakers, educators and the public for educational and cultural purposes.

AARNet worked closely with the team at AIATSIS to understand the Institute’s needs and delivered a robust and scalable network solution to underpin research and digital preservation activities into the future.

To meet AIATSIS’ evolving needs, a fibre build was completed in 2023 to connect the new AIATSIS Central Australia facility in Alice Springs to the AARNet network. AIATSIS Central Australia will enable the local preservation of community-held collection materials and repatriation of Indigenous collections and cultural information.

Australia is a multilingual country in one of the world’s most linguistically diverse regions. Significant collections of this intangible cultural heritage have been amassed, including collections of Australian Indigenous languages and languages of the Pacific. In Australia, AIATSIS is one of several institutions with extensive First Nations language data collection. PARADISEC (Pacific languages and Indigenous Australian languages) is another, among other collections.

The language data in these collections include audio and video recordings of people speaking as well as written texts, from entire newspapers to tweets. It is used for linguistic research into pronunciation, syntax, semantics, how languages are used, how languages and their use change over time, and vary across social groups.

But still, much of Australia’s language data is scattered, hard to find, and in danger of being lost forever, making it a critical time to focus resources on revitalising and preserving First Nations languages here.

With co-investment from the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), a National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) facility, a new digital research infrastructure, the Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA) is being developed by 17 partner institutions, including AARNet and AIATSIS, as a sustainable long-term resource for these language data collections of national significance.

LDaCA is supervising an ongoing audit of language data held by institutions in Australia and existing technological solutions for managing these data. The project aims to secure vulnerable and dispersed collections and provide access to improved digital analysis tools to drive new research outcomes. The project also intends to establish a model for an institutional data repository that could be used at a national scale across organisations for the preservation of and access to research data and collections.

This work follows CARE (Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility and Ethics) and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data principles, as well as First Nations data governance protocols, to form a data commons that will benefit Australian humanities and social sciences scholarship for many years to come and help institutions share data more freely, ethically, and cooperatively.