University of DivinityThis article is reposted from atla.com. Read the original post here.
In April 2025, the University of Divinity in Box Hill, Australia, was awarded an Atla Digitization Grant for the project, “Women and the Australian Church (WATAC): A Digitization Project to Safeguard WATAC’s Publication Legacy and Address Knowledge and Gender Gaps in Australia’s Religious History Narrative.”
The $5,000 USD grant was awarded to enable the digitization of the print issues of WATAC News, a quarterly newsletter produced by Women and the Australian Church (WATAC Inc.). The grant application included letters of support from the Vice-Chancellor at the University of Divinity, Professor James McLaren, long-time WATAC member Patricia Madigan, and the current WATAC President, Andrea Dean. WATAC also granted permission to digitize, display and share WATAC News online and to include appropriate rights statements in the metadata for each item.
The work of WATAC members and the publication of WATAC News corresponds to a period of time when many women in the church were advocating for change. Digitized versions of this newsletter would provide access for researchers everywhere to a resource that offers an often-ignored feminist perspective from women associated with the Australian church.
The project’s manager, Kerrie Burn, provided a report on work completed with the grant’s assistance. Hear from Burn below.
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To organize the project, all available print issues of WATAC News were gathered by a representative of WATAC and posted to me, in the position of project manager. The association was able to source some additional issues, and these were forwarded at a later date. The project inventory template submitted as part of the initial application process was subsequently updated to incorporate all issues available for digitization.
The digitization of all issues was undertaken on an A1 digital scanner available at Mannix Library, in East Melbourne, which houses the unit on behalf of the University of Divinity. I was provided with initial training in the use of the scanner by Mannix Library staff, which gave me an opportunity to develop my technical and digital skills. The scanner was set up to optimize its settings for the digitization process and ensure that the best-quality images were produced. It was a slow process, with each page captured as a single image on the scanner. The work continued part-time over approximately six months, whenever I was able to travel to Melbourne and visit the library. Eventually, the scanning of all available issues of WATAC News was completed. PDF files were created as part of the initial scanning process, and these were subsequently converted to OCR, so that the text in these initial 125 files would be searchable.
A template was prepared incorporating metadata and PDF files in preparation for adding content to the University of Divinity’s CONTENTdm Digital Collections website. All digitized files were subsequently uploaded in February 2026. A total of 150 WATAC News files were made available on this site, and they are now freely available for anyone to access. This includes all print issues that have been digitized, as well as some (mostly later) issues that were provided to me electronically. Issues made available online span from Vol. 1 No. 1 (April 1990) through to Vol. 36 No. 2 (May 2025). In addition, three miscellaneous issues of WATAC News from state branches were also made available. All print issues were eventually returned to WATAC.
As well as being made available via the University of Divinity’s Digital Collections website, all 150 issues of WATAC News were also made available as one of the University’s collections on the JSTOR Platform. Around this time, contact was made with the Atla Digital Initiatives Librarian to confirm requirements for metadata creation and harvesting or digital collection hosting by the Atla Digital Library. Atla ultimately harvested the metadata and files from the University’s Digital Collections website and ingested the content into the Atla Digital Library. In the future, the content will be incorporated into Eureka. This open-access research tool that Atla is launching in late 2026 will become the new home of current Atla Digital Library content. Having multiple access points will ultimately make WATAC News more discoverable and available for future study and research.
This digitization project complements previous digitization efforts at the University of Divinity and work undertaken on Wikipedia as part of the Australian Women in Religion WikiProject. Publications previously digitized include: the complete archive of Women-Church: an Australian Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, published between 1987 and 2007; sixty-one issues of Magdalene, a Christian newsletter for women; and multiple publications associated with the Movement for the Ordination of Women in Australia. The latter includes several conference proceedings resulting from collaborations among different Christian feminist groups. These include: Towards a feminist Theology (1989), Women Authoring Theology (1991), and Dangerous Memory: Feminist Theology Through Story (1995). All of these publications are available on the University of Divinity Digital Collections website. When the Women-Church journal was initially digitized, arrangements were also made with Atla to index all content and make the full text available through Atlas PLUS®.
Taken together, all of these digitization initiatives help to safeguard the publication legacy of each publishing group and address knowledge and gender gaps in Australia’s religious history narrative. The content provides a wonderful resource for students and scholars interested in feminist theology in Australia and the history of various Australian Christian feminist groups, including WATAC, Women-Church, and the Movement for the Ordination of Women. The material is historically and culturally significant because it documents a period in Australian history related to women and the rise of Christian feminism, a history that is underrepresented in the religious history narrative. The work of these groups corresponds to a period of time when many women in the church were advocating for change. The digitization process and the making of material available online shines a light on stories told from a feminist perspective, from groups that were part of the wider women’s movement in Australia. It ensures that the writings of the contributors to these publications are not lost, but are available to inform future reformers and researchers.
A related project is detailed in a forthcoming article in Theological Librarianship. This article describes efforts to enhance the discoverability of digital library collections by adding links to these collections to specific Wikipedia articles and Wikidata items. Links were added to biographical articles about individual women as well as the groups and publications that were associated with the early years of Christian feminism in Australia. The result is that anyone engaging with these Wikipedia articles in the future will be able to link directly to content from the University’s digitized library collections. Because Wikipedia is one of the most-visited websites, this linking process has the potential to enhance discoverability of these collections, and make them accessible to a broader audience.
We sincerely thank Atla for awarding a digitization grant to the University of Divinity and for the valuable work that this grant facilitated.
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