(Multicultural) Knowledge Infrastructure: A Trove Lists Case Study

Professional organisations provide networking and knowledge exchange opportunities and offer potential for knowledge production. While Australia is a multicultural and multilingual country, we lack systematic information on Australian English-language publications and their translated multilingual editions. This paper discusses the development of the Translated Australian Literature Trove Lists project, which aims to advocate and promote Australian titles published in languages other than English to readers in and beyond Australia. The project was conceptualised and implemented through the Australia Library Information Association (ALIA) Multicultural Committee. We will discuss the two facets of this interdisciplinary collaborative project and the ALIA Multicultural Committee's roles. First, the project team creates language-specific lists of translated Australian titles on Trove, a free online library catalogue managed by the National Library of Australia (https://trove.nla.gov.au/). Second, the team analysed the spatial distribution of translated titles to compare with census data. We argue that professional organisations that cultivate cultural and linguistic diversity are multilingual knowledge infrastructures. This paper first presents an analysis of selected Trove Lists of Translated Children's Picturebooks. Then we discuss the behind-the-scenes interdisciplinary collaboration to highlight the multicultural knowledge and social infrastructure that reflect our cultural past while helping shape our multicultural future.