The Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) is a product of the Australian historical community, a national collaborative project spanning nearly six decades. The ADB’s foundational volumes (1 to 12) featured concise lives of Australians from 1788 which were disproportionately about male, European-Australians and the socially prominent. This panel will discuss far-reaching changes at the ADB in the last decade or so, starting with the 2005 ‘missing persons’ volume and the online publication of all volumes in 2007, which are leading to the rescaling of the ADB. There is no better forum than the AHA conference at which to have a wider discussion with our key constituents about how we select and present the Australian lives we research. We will discuss our major research projects with reference to the conference theme of scale.

Timescale? (Temporal variation): The ADB has established an Indigenous Working Party and Shino Konishi is leading an Indigenous Australian Dictionary of Biography project. We are publishing articles on Mungo Man and Woman, and by so doing, pushing our timescale back 42,000 years.

Large scale? (Sampling variation): The ADB is increasingly developing big data to help understand the individual in her and his wider place, as well as in relation to the collective. This has led to our developing family trees and spatial visualization. We have embarked, for instance, on a First Three Fleets project.

Multiple scales? (Selection variation): The ADB has always said that it includes significant and representative Australians. The balance, however, has been skewed towards the significant. Our project on Colonial Women is one of the necessary but not sufficient correctives.