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News
Who are we?
The Citizen Science Team of the Australian Meteorological
Assoc (AMetA) is a self-managing team that has been hosted
by the Bureau of Meteorology for the past 20 years. It's primary
purpose is to rescue old Australian weather records to assist
climate change analysis (search met-acre MERIT). Our
foundation Meteorologist was Sir Charles Todd who established
and managed SA's globally significant colonial weather service
between 1855 to 1905. However Todd was also a foundation
scientist in many other disciplines, as outlined on this website.
Since very few resources exist to give a comprehensive view of
this pioneer, the Team has spawned a Citizen History Group.
For the past 2 years, the group has been building a large
database of primary documents on Todd’s professional life.
Eventually holding 5000+ records, the database project needs
a coordinator to establish editing and metadata regimes and to
assess and implement suitable publishing software for curation
of the collection on the team's historical website.
What are We Doing?
Gearing off Todd’s very public approach to his work, much of his activities were recorded by the press of the day. Thus, the primary online source of text records is the National Library’s TROVE newspaper collection. As a result, the group has been searching for and downloading/correcting relevant newspaper articles. This will be added to other material including images and videos available from our close cooperation with Todd family descendants and other Todd researchers. To date, the group has combed TROVE for the years 1856-1872 resulting in approximately 2000 downloaded, corrected and annotated documents. As years progress beyond 1872, Todd’s increasing profile in the Colony results in more and more dense news coverage. The continued growth of the collection is guaranteed for as long as the Team continues working on it. The Team believes it is taking a unique approach to history. Since Todd’s contributions to Colonial science were so eclectic, we are not attempting to write history. Rather, we are gathering salient online resources into a comprehensive database that can be flexibly interrogated to illuminate any one of hundreds of views of Todd’s activities in early Australian science that researchers may want to take.AMetA Citizen Science
Links
Association website CitHistory trial website CitSci Project website Todd Weather Folios Project CitSci global project
…comfort in working with MS-
Word and Excel
…capacity to assess and
implement online text-
management solutions (eg.
Omeka)
…an organised approach to the
planning and implementation of
projects
…desire to work cooperatively in
a team and as a team leader
…ability to commit for the long
term nature of the project
…willingness to work onsite at
the Weather Bureau with the
history group all-day Fridays.
Required Qualities
…an interest in South Australian
history
…a long work record, including in
an office environment
…probably retired
…understanding that volunteering
offers opportunities for professional
development
…ability to pass a police check
Desired Qualities
Project Coordinator
Citizen History Group
The collection has reached the
stage where a Project Coordinator
is now required to:
…establish an editing regime for
the downloaded TROVE articles
…establish a metadata regime to
assist in the organised retrieval of
articles, monographs and images
…do a requirements analysis for a
’net-based tool to curate and
interrogate the resource database
…source suitable web-publishing
software. The team has done a
small trial implementation of
Omeka, a publishing platform for
libraries, archives, and scholarly
collections (click Todd Research
Centre on Home page)
…(optionally) Coordinate the
completion of this Sir Charles Todd
website
Who do we Need?
NEWS
