proACTive

Number 217: October 2001

Models of consortia: a vendor's perspective
Clint Rumble, EBSCO Publishing, vice-president of International Sales, will give a presentation on 'Models of consortia' at 2:00pm on Wednesday 3 October, in the McDonald Room, Menzies Library, ANU.

There will be a discussion of consortia models employed by libraries in various nations and regions worldwide. The focus will be on:

the selection and implementation of aggregated full text databases;
the criteria and decision mechanisms used by libraries;
what expectations exist and how best they can be fulfilled, from a vendor's perspective.

The consortia examples to be discussed are FinElib (Finland), STIC (Taiwan), CUDI (Mexico) and EIFL Direct (Central and Eastern Europe as well as sub-Saharan Africa) covering situations where all non-commercial libraries participate or just academic libraries alone.

How do consortia work in Australia, and how do they compare with the above? The discussion will feature:

why these libraries opted to form consortia for the acquisition of aggregated full text databases;
what were their goals and the importance of vendorsto fully understand these goals;
establishing criteria - an interactive process;
selection processes;
launch and implementation;
sustainability - the ultimate goal and measurement of success.

Contact: Nancy Clarke, URLs Secretary, ph 02 6209 1117, n.clarke@signadou.acu.edu.au

An Information Odyssey
About 40 delegates from Canberra attended the 11th National Library Technicians Conference, 'An Information Odyssey', in Hobart 21-24 August. There was plenty for the 360 delegates to enjoy, from the Scottish piper piping in the opening ceremony to the barbershop quartet and singsong that concluded a very successful conference. Between whiles, we took part in forums, joined discussion groups, listened to papers, took in library tours, attended presentations and visited the trade exhibitions.

An important feature of the conference was putting faces to names that we had heard or seen through document delivery, library interaction or libtec. Canberra was well represented, with ACT Techs presenting papers and, of course, Marion Boyd receiving the ALIA Library Technician of the Year Award at the conference dinner. The dinner had an Antarctic theme, reflecting both snow-covered Mt Wellington and the professional interests of a couple of the special libraries of the area.

Aska Moya was sponsored by ACT Techs and ACTive ALIA to attend the conference. She will present her paper to ACT Techs at our next gathering, at the Hancock Library on 3 October, and at some future date to ACTive ALIA.

The conference made the Canberrans proud that the purple theme of the Canberra conference was continued by the Tasmanian conference.

Then, on Thursday 13 September, a group of 21 ACT Techs gathered for a lovely 3-course 'flambé' dinner at the CIT Restaurant. Many who attended the conference came to the dinner and there was much enthusiasm (and, of course, networking) between the courses and the flames. Marion Boyd brought along her library technician award and shared it with her friends and colleagues.

Beth Clary, convenor ACT Technicians

PEARLS
PEARLS (Previously Employed Australian Retired Librarians) last met on 13 August, for coffee, cake and conversation. About half a dozen people attended. Topics ranged from Antarctica to Income Tax. Gabrielle Watt told us of her adventures in Antarctica with the National Trust last year. Jon Prance, who always has difficulty completing his tax return, consoled himself with a quotation from Albert Einstein: 'The hardest thing in the world to understand is Income Tax'.

Next meeting will be at Backbenches, Old Parliament House, on Monday 8 October, at 2:30pm. Any questions? Contact: Jon Prance, ph 02 6255 1857, prance@c031.aone.net.au.

ALIA Award for Innovation
The HealthInsite Editorial Team was thrilled to be presented with this year's ALIA Award for Innovation (Health Libraries) at the midwinter dinner in August. The award was for the 'Development of the topic query technique to support the navigation structure for HealthInsite'.

For those who are not familiar with HealthInsite, it is a gateway website linking to quality health information resources on the websites of some of Australia's most authoritative health organisations. It can be found at http://www.healthinsite.gov.au. Each of the resources has a metadata record in HealthInsite, based on the AGLS metadata standard. The metadata subjects are taken from the Health and Aged Care Thesaurus (produced by the Library of the Department of Health and Aged Care - it is available in PDF at http://www.health.gov.au/thesaurus.htm).

The browsing function on HealthInsite is a hierarchical topic structure, with broad topics such as 'diseases and conditions' broken down into subtopics. If we had fixed the topic structure at the beginning, then we could have used a classification scheme to assign resources to topics. Instead we decided to rely on the thesaurus subject terms. When a HealthInsite user selects a topic, a dynamic search is performed on the metadata subjects to produce a list of the resources relevant to that topic. With this technique, we have the flexibility to adjust the topic structure depending upon user needs, government priorities and the quantity of resources available. In other words, we can adjust the topic structure without having to change individual metadata records.

There was some criticism of our approach and so we decided to undertake a full recall-precision analysis to evaluate it. Just as well we did because we found errors or problems at each stage of our information retrieval process - the thesaurus, indexing practices, topic definition and topic search strategies! We spent a lot of time making corrections only to discover that our search engine did not re-index correctly. Many months later we now have a new search engine and a much tighter information retrieval process which allows us to aim for 90-95 per cent recall and precision in the topic queries.

This project required some tact because we had to analyse and criticise one another's work. However it showed the benefits of indexers and search specialists working together to get the best out of an information retrieval system. We would like to acknowledge the support of the rest of the HealthInsite team, particularly the technical staff who designed the systems to meet our specifications. Receiving the award has helped to confirm our professional role in a non-library work environment.

Prue Deacon, Jill Buckley Smith and Stephanie Tow
HealthInsite editorial team
Commonwealth Department of Health and Aged Care

The ALIA ACT and District
Health Forum - Invitation to join us
The ALIA ACT and District Health Forum was formed as part of the recent restructure of the Australian Library and Information Association. Unfortunately, the list of members we have received from ALIA is very short . We are not sure if potential members decided not to rejoin ALIA this year, or simply missed ticking the Health Forum box.

However, whether people are members of ALIA or not, we would still like to invite all health library/information service staff - health/biomedical librarians, library technicians or other staff - to participate in our activities.

The Health Forum organises professional and development meetings to focus on current health and information related areas; considers professional issues and establishes standards to achieve best practice; shares resources and ideas, experience and expertise. We also support the national activities of Health Libraries Australia.

If you would like to be on our mailing list for information and announcements, please send your name and address to one of the convenors of the ALIA ACT and District Health Forum, Prue Deacon, prue.deacon@health.gov.au (ph 02 6289 7505), or Jill Buckley Smith, jill.smith@health.gov.au (ph 02 6289 8488).

aliaNEWS
aliaNEWS is distributed by every month to subscribing members of ALIA and other interested individuals. This month's issue, dated 6 September 2001, includes the following news items and more:

free Hertz #1 Club membership, and discounted rental rates for vehicles in the Hertz range for all ALIA members.
Library and Information Week 2002 will take place from Monday 20 May to Sunday 26 May. It will coincide with the ALIA 2002 Biennial Conference, in Sydney from 20 to 22 May. The theme is 'Powering our future: contribute to the information agenda'.
two new ALIA groups have been formed, ALIA TAFE Queensland and ALIA Victoria, making 71 in all.
however, the ALIA Children's and Youth Services group has advised that it will not be establishing itself.
major improvements are being made to ALIAnet's bandwidth during September. The previously promised quadrupling of bandwidth will be exceeded by a considerable amount!
there were also a number of requests for comment and for nominations, and a job opportunity - alas, with September deadlines now past.

See the rest of aliaNEWS at http://www.alia.org.au/alianet/e-lists/alianews/2001.09.html Are you a subscriber? If not, perhaps you should consider becoming one. It gets better all the time!

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