Director eScholarship Research Centre (eSRC)
Mr Gavan McCarthy
Email: gavanjm@unimelb.edu.au
Office: Level 2, Thomas Cherry Building
Role
Gavan is responsible for leading and managing the eScholarship Research Centre of the University Library.
The Centre was created in 2007 from the Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre in the Faculty of Arts and innovative staff from what was then Information Services.
The broad goal of the Centre is to help the University and specifically the Library evolve the digital infrastructure and services for a leading university of the 21st century.
The Centre achieves this goal by working directly with researchers on projects with a significant digital component, and with the Library, Information Technology Services, the Director eResearch and the Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (VeRSI), to develop policy and internal infrastructure. The Centre has sufficient hardware and software capability to try out technologies that might become of value at the enterprise level.
Background
Gavan in some form or other has been associated with the University of Melbourne since he left school. In the late 1970s he started work as a casual with the University of Melbourne Archives while finishing his degree in music composition at Latrobe University.
In 1984 he took on a full-time archival position and music became a casual pursuit.
From 1985 to 1999 Gavan was in charge of the Australian Science Archives Project (ASAP) in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in the Faculty of Arts and during this period completed a Master's degree in archives and records at Monash University.
In 1999 ASAP strengthened its academic and research focus and became the Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre with Gavan as Director and Senior Research Fellow. His current position was established in 2007.