APSIG Newsletter number 53 - November 2003

News from the NLA

The National Library went live with its new Voyager library system on 3 December 2003. At the same time a new website was launched with not only a new look and feel, but a major restructuring of content. It is now possible for users to search both the catalogue and the website at the same time.

The Voyager OPAC is a considerable improvement on its predecessor, with a more user-friendly interface and the opportunity to limit searches within the whole database, rather than having to search separate subsets. For Asian and Pacific collections users there is the opportunity to limit searches by country of publication for the first time, for example Japanese books published in the last ten years.

This release of Voyager does not enable the display or searching of non-Roman scripts, but the system vendors, Endeavor, do have a Unicode release available. The Library will implement a Unicode version of the database in the next one to two years.

The NLA's Voyager catalogue is searchable on http://catalogue.nla.gov.au. Please visit it and give the NLA your feedback.