พิพิธภัณฑ์และโครงการสถาบันการศึกษาชาวอะบอริจินและชาวเกาะช่องแคบทอร์เรสแห่งออสเตรเลีย (AIATSIS)Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies

The founding purpose was salvage, in the vocabulary of its time: to record language, song, art, material culture, ceremonial life and social structure before those traditions perished in the face of European ways. No Aboriginal people attended the 1961 conference that planned the institute. Before 1970 there had never been an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander member on its council. The 1989 Act changed the arithmetic: a council of nine, of whom the Act requires that at least five be Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, with one of the Minister's appointees a Torres Strait Islander.

The collection was built by donation, gift, purchase and fieldwork, and also by deposit — an arrangement that permits the original owners to assign access and use conditions appropriate to the cultural information in the items. That clause is the hinge. It means an item can sit in a national collection and still be governed by the people it came from.

The handling rules follow from it. AIATSIS holds material that is sensitive and/or secret/sacred to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and under its founding Act adheres to strict protocols when processing it. Restricted visual media are stored separately from the rest of the collection. Audio and moving-image items are not played until cultural requirements have been checked. Restricted material is digitised in secured conditions such as enclosed booths, by staff who can meet the protocols of the item being digitised. The institute also supports the protocols of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library, Information and Resource Network.

On the research side, AIATSIS published the Guidelines for Ethical Research in Australian Indigenous Studies in 1999, updated them in 2012, and replaced them in 2020 with the AIATSIS Code of Ethics for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research. The Code rests on four principles: Indigenous self-determination, Indigenous leadership, impact and value, and sustainability and accountability.

A new precinct, Ngurra, is planned on the shore of Lake Burley Griffin at a stated A$316.5 million, to include a resting place for ancestral remains of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that cannot be returned to Country. AIATSIS Central Australia opened in Alice Springs / Mparntwe on 2 February 2024. The institute's Australian Indigenous Language Collection is registered in UNESCO's Memory of the World programme — a different UNESCO instrument from the intangible-heritage lists.