City of Sydney Council has approved a quarter of a million dollars worth of funding for the Dictionary of Sydney project.
The funds will allow the Dictionary of Sydney to expand by designing a ‘light’ version of the site for mobile and touch screen devices.
The dictionary is an online space where Sydney’s stories and history come together under a single URL.
“The Dictionary of Sydney is an extraordinary project – like Wikipedia, it is a fascinating social and evolving history, but with local academics and historians thoroughly reviewing all additions to the dictionary.
“It is also a reliable source of information about Sydney’s life and history,” said Lord Mayor Clover Moore MP.
The modern day encyclopedia contains essays, oral histories, photographs, artistic representations, sound bites, film and maps.
Topics range from entries on the Chalk Urban Art Festival to colour pieces on the foundation of the Salvation Army, and profiles on historic Sydney icons like Hyde Park, the Queen Victoria Building and the Harbor Bridge.
“The Dictionary of Sydney will offer all Sydneysiders and visitors a window into both the past and the present,” said Stephen Garton, Chief Investigator on the project.
Garry Wotherspoon, a contributor for the site, historian and former Sydney University academic said: “One of the most interesting stories I’ve worked on was looking into Sydney’s coffee habits – who would have imagined that a convict colony set up by the tea drinking English would be come one of the major coffee consuming countries in the world?”
The Dictionary of Sydney is currently viewed in 187 countries and with these developments it will continue to expand from where it first started.
For more information visit: www.dictionaryofsydney.org
By Nishtha Handa
