Professor of History Hamish Maxwell-Stewart started his presentation with a warning:

We need decent funding to consolidate what we have done so far. If we don’t, we’ll lose what we have.

An example of loss was some work done on Tasmanian records from the 1800s that had to be retrieved from the University of Adelaide because at the University of Tasmania, where the work had been done, the database had become obsolete. It would have been very expensive to collate that data again but because it was retrieved, Tasmania is now the first state in Australia to have linked BDM data, and linked WWI data so researchers can now match service files to birth certificates.

Professor Maxwell-Stewart explained that Tasmania also has indexed street directories, and property records from 1847. There is now the possibility to link data about houses to data about households. This is unique in Australia. These datasets can now be geocoded and there is potential for more but to make further advances in aggregating datasets, much more needs to be done.

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