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Year in Review 2016
Catholic Diocese of Sandhurst
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MISSION & OUTREACH
Our History Digitised for
Preservation and access
T
he Catholic Diocese of Sandhurst has been awarded a $5,515.00 federal Community
Heritage Grant to fund the Digitisation of Historical Parish Sacramental Registers. The
grant was announced at the National Library of Australia in Canberra on October 25, 2016.
Grants worth $415,075 were distributed to 77 community groups and organisations from
around Australia to assist in the identification and preservation of community-owned, but
nationally significant, heritage collections. In addition, first-time recipients attended a three-
day intensive preservation and collection management workshop held at the National Library,
the National Museum of Australia and the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra.
Bishop Leslie Tomlinson said the grant was important in supporting the effort to preserve the
parish sacramental registers which are a significant collectionmanagement issue throughout the
Diocese. “Requests for information from sacramental registers are very common throughout
the Diocese and some of the parish registers cannot be accessed due to their age and fragility.
This project will see those early historical parish registers professionally copied to microform
so that a stable master set is created and kept permanently in the diocesan archive. The data
on the master microform will be watermarked and converted to pdf, providing a working set
for parishes as well as the diocesan archive. The working set will aid transcription projects and
provide easier access to the records, enabling requests from the public (within the scope of
privacy legislation) to be undertaken. Most importantly, the original registers, many of which
are still manually handled, will be permanently preserved. After digitisation, all of the original
registers will be stored safely and securely ensuring their long term preservation.”