A Curated Library Collection: Pacific Records and the Australian Joint Copying Project, 1939–54

This article examines the identification and acquisition of documents for the Australian Joint Copying Project (AJCP) from 1939 to 1954. It argues that the AJCP’s evolving scope reflected Australia’s shifting geopolitical identity and intellectual ambitions in the Pacific. Initially shaped by librarians’ efforts to address a national shortage of research materials, the AJCP expanded after World War II with the involvement of the Australian National University’s Research School of Pacific Studies. Drawing on administrative records and policy manuscripts held at the National Library of Australia and the State Library of New South Wales, the article shows that the AJCP was a curated collection, shaped by librarians and historians to serve Australian scholarly and geopolitical interests while bringing imperial records concerning the Pacific into Australian research institutions. The AJCP’s history reveals the curatorial nature of library work and the role of historians in shaping access to Pacific records.