Thank you to The Australian Council of University Art & Design Schools (ACUADS) for funding an expansion of DAAO’s work in Western Australia this year.

As a national research tool,  DAAO aims to be representative of creative practice in every Australian state and territory. However, initiating content growth in any state requires time on the ground to run feedback and training sessions and to assess digital collection data. In short, we need initial resources to support the DAAO community before it can be self-sustaining.  Gillian’s trip to WA this year was the first time we’ve had the opportunity to meet with local researchers and collecting institutions on their own turf, and we found that interest from WA exceeded our ability to respond.

Thanks to support from ACUADS, initiated by Prof. Marie Sierra, we were able to extend our work in WA and complete a data sharing partnership with Artsource, the peak membership body for visual artists in the state.  The partnership resulted in the creation of 416 NEW records, and still more data being added to existing stub records.  This is a fantastic result and we hope that this will become a bigger data partnership in future.

There is so much great work being done in WA, it’s great to be making new inroads in the area.