 The Australian Dictionary Biography is Australia's preeminent dictionary project and over 50 years it's produced, well-crafted, concise, informative and we'd say fascinating articles on 13,000 Australians and these articles began to be written in the 1950s. First publication was in 1966 and at that time Australian history was just beginning. Indeed the first meeting for the ADB was the first meeting of historians around Australia of, by and for, Australian history. So the ADB in the beginning was very important for promoting Australian history and setting out the lives of Australians. And now when we have so much on the web you know with Wikipedia and all these other sources there's been much biographical work the ADB still plays an extraordinarily important role because it's well-crafted, concise and it's research edited, it's credible and amongst this amazing avalanche material we have these days the ADB remains a credible source that people use in the first instance. And so the ADB has been showing Australians for 50 years, it's a gallery and it shows the various ways in which you can be Australian it asks questions about what it is to be Australian and what Australians have achieved both significantly and as representatives of their community. So it first started with really a set of catalogue cards so in 1954 we had a card catalogue which had details of Australians and from that working parties chose and selected Australians to be written up for the ADB but to change or transform that set of cards into a national achievement of collaborative scholarship really took some doing and Keith Hancock was one of the major people behind that and it really talks to the charter of the ANU because what he did was he decided that it would be the signature piece to bring Australian historians together on a collaborative project and so it took a great deal to establish working parties in every state. We had our first employee Ann Moyle in 1959 quite literally take a journey around Australia encouraging people to join it and so to bring in we have literally had hundreds of working party members at any one time there's 10 working parties we've had thousands of writers four and a half thousand Australians have authored articles on Australians over the 50 years so it's a massive collaborative project and took quite a bit of energy and the ANU has hosted, nurtured and has seriously cultivated this project over those years it has brought together in concert Australian historians and what's really fascinating is what we can show that some historians writing ADB articles have gone on to produce major pieces of work so one of our chair people of the editorial board Professor Jill Rowe, she did two articles for the ADB which have turned into books her book on Stella Miles Franklin is award-winning and it started with a 900 word ADB article Carolunchism and others who are on the school curriculum they're standard familiars but we can actually chart the popularity for instance when Mary McKillop was saintate the Catholics of Australia had their Christmas lunch and they went to the computer afterwards and she was the most hit upon of our articles for a couple of weeks similarly you can see the engagement with popular culture so a TV programme like Underbelly then results in a large number of people looking up articles on Tilly Divine or Scudgy Taylor so clearly people are looking at popular culture events wondering is that true, is that authentic what about the story, how can I find out more and they go to the ADB articles the ADB went online in 2006 and it now has over 60 million hits a year and we're all the time monitoring what it is that people are interested in 9 million Australians died before 1990 and we have many websites not only the ADB but we have companion websites like Abitrix Australia we now have 23,000 people on those sorts of websites so people are able to come in and navigate they're able to look at individuals and then they're able to do other things that you couldn't do with a book so the ADB has gone on a cultural journey from a book to digital online resource and it's not just a book online you can do all of these amazing navigations and journeys yourself through the ADB at any one time we're working on 600 articles so we've just published a group of people who died in 1992 and there are the artists Sydney Nolan, Nolan on Nolan there are Brett Whiteley there are a whole range of them but on the other hand there's the representative groups and they often are amongst my favourites so Hazel Holliman was the first air hostess in Australia and she became a matron but quite often when some of her girls were sick she would take to the air herself and so that's a particularly interesting article which talks to transport history in Australia women's occupations and a whole range of business aspects the ADB's size and its significance and its impact means that people will look to the ADB for all kinds of new ways of using information now I mentioned using lives and this really is what we'll be doing in the future so people are able to do collective biography to tease out families which have been significant in Australian history and that's not been able to be done before because we have multi-generational data we're creating big data on which new projects can be based and so we are doing family trees of families showing and this really gets over the issue that the ADB is about significant people because families always have people who are prominent I've never seen the light of day as it were and so these family trees are showing us a gallery of Australians that we haven't had before we're also doing network analysis and teasing out collective biographies of the important associational groups that Australians have been involved in over time so we're able to look at trade unions, business, politicians women's organisations and in a way that hasn't been done again because of the size, the significance and the ability to make an impact