ALIA West

October 2005

National Library of Australia visit to Perth

The National Library of Australia visit to Perth 20 September 2005 by the director-general of the National Library of Australia, Jan Fullerton and senior staff was well received by approximately 100 colleagues and students who attended the presentations at the State Library of Western Australia. Both the NLA and State Library of WA are thanked for their hospitality.

It was a very full morning program and an ideal opportunity to catch in a nutshell, many of the current initiatives of this large national institution. Jan Fullerton opened the session by outlining the NLA's strategic directions. We were then treated to an entertaining and informative run down from Mark Corbould, assistant director-general information technology, on some of the ways in which the new internet technologies might be used by NLA. We found out that the technology can work for live demonstrations most of the time and when it does not, then there is always something else we can try. Roxanne Missingham, assistant director-general resource sharing then outlined the planning behind and the Libraries Australia initiative and also the intricacies of reaching agreement on the free access model to this initiative. Marie-Louise Ayres, project manager, MusicAustralia ably assisted Roxanne and other NLA colleagues with some interesting demonstrations of this and other online products.

Dr Warwick S Cathro, assistant director-general innovation is well known to many of us through conference presentations on many initiatives including Dublin core metadata, information architecture, the National Document and Information Service (NDIS) project. It was exciting to hear him now outline ways in which the NLA might be improving access through national infrastructure in order to enable seamless access for library users throughout Australia. He was followed by Jasmine Cameron, assistant director-general executive and co-ordination support who outlined the digitisation for national access: Music Australia and Australian Newspapers Online projects. Music Australia is now well and truly up and running with the newspapers online project in test form.

All of these initiatives are based on the extensive collections of the NLA and collaborating libraries, something which all speakers stressed. Pam Gatenby, assistant director-general collections management outlined how the NLA's collections made these projects possible and how their value as records for all Australians continued to be recognised. Much time is spent at the NLA properly documenting and cataloguing all of its holdings. The program closed with a short presentation on national site licensing from Roxanne Missingham who outlined actions resulting from a forum held on the topic in 2004. We were encouraged to refer to the issues paper for further information.

The NLA emphasised the value of the formal and informal collaborative arrangements that are the hallmark of Australian libraries. It is hoped that this event, sponsored by Information Studies @ Curtin, the State Library of WA and ALIAWest encourages renewed interest amongst the profession in WA for matters of professional interest.

Kerry Smith, Information Studies @ Curtin