ALIA West 2026

Perth
2026 September 17 (Thursday), 6:00PM
· ALIA · conferences · SLWA ·

The 2026 ALIA West conference was held on a Thursday and Friday in September 2026. I'm not a librarian, and was attending as a Wikimedian partly to help with the idea of Wikifying a Conference. The venue was the State Library of WA, and it's good that the café there opens before the library itself does, because we got an extra hour of talking time. (It's a clique but so often true that conferences are about talking to people more than listening to presentations!)

It was good to meet the WA Military Digital Library folk. There were two of them, representing a team of about ten. WAMDL uses MediaWiki and it was great to hear more about what they think of it (they like it of course). It turns out they're running from a self-hosted server at the home of one of the organisers! There's a possibility that we'll get organised and start a chat channel for Australian history wiki people, because there are about five such wikis currently operating (plus a few defunct ones). Time for an Aussie MediaWiki users' group!

The Welcome to Country was by Freda Ogilvie, a retired school principal from the north west.

Trish Ryder's keynote about the 1940s Carrolup artworks was very moving. The John Curtin Gallery is using the term 'once known' rather than 'unknown' to refer to children who's names weren't recorded alongside their art (it's also the name of the exhibition that's opening soon at the Cloisters).

An autistic LIS student gave a lively talk about what it's like to be neurodivergent and attend conferences. It sounds like the library world is fairly supportive — perhaps there's some sort of overlap between librarians and neurodivergence?

Curtin have set up a mature age student club, run by the library. I think they need a wiki club (although really I'd rather Notre Dame had one, because they're closer to me).

Two metadata nerds from UWA presented about UWA Collected. I spoke to one of them, Jonah Highman (a self-confessed metadata nerd), and it does sound like some sort of UWA-Wikimedia communication could be fun. The Two Centuries of Chinese Heritage in WA project looks terrific (and huge). I found a letter that I added to my family archives: archiveswiki:Letter to H. Gregory 20 October 1920. UWA Collected uses the Recollect software, which seems to be growing in popularity these days.

FamilyHistoryWA presented about their on-going ghost town project. They're a good bunch for planning (like perhaps many organisations run by retired nerds). Two years of thinking before they created their first database record; they've now got 140,000, although none are public yet. They're only including people relating to any of the 950 "ghost communities" that they're tracking. I'm not sure how much interlinking they're doing to other sites such as Wikidata or WikiTree. There were two ghost communities on Rottnest! I'm guessing one was the Army camp, not sure about the other. Some currently-disappearing towns are being included too (like Sandstone).

The are creating records of every person, and leaving disambiuation up to future researchers.

Alice Woods and Gnangarra talked about Wikimedia Australia and the partner projects and other things (and I even spoke briefly about MediaWiki, and Noongarpedia!). In none of the sessions was there much time for questions, so it's hard to know what the library folk think of wiki stuff. Hopefully they're keen.

There was plenty more talked about, all very interesting, but I was trying to listen more than get distracted with note-taking.