ALIA Academic, Research and Collection Management

Presentation by Tony Boston from the National Library of Australia

Joint ARCoM & Libraries Australia SA Committee event
with Tony Boston, Assistant Director-General,
Resource Sharing, at the National Library of Australia.

On Monday 13th August a good number of library and information professionals gathered at the State Library for Tony Boston's presentation, New developments in National Library discovery services to support education and research. We settled in with some drinks and nibbles, and the presentation was well received, detailed with new NLA resource sharing projects. Here's a rundown of what his presentation covered.

To begin, Tony outlined the NLA Discovery Service goals. He is referring to the big collections that are Libraries Australia, Picture Australia, Music Australia and more. The goals include reducing barriers to finding and getting resources, making services easier to use, collaborating with other collecting agencies, and supporting resource contributions and annotations by users in the Web 2.0 style.

Libraries Australia

The ANBD (Australian National Bibliographic Database) in Libraries Australia has been built by Australian libraries for over 25 years, presently with 42 million items held at around 1,000 libraries. Since the free service commenced, 10-15% of searches are done by end-users.

The NLA catalogue and Libraries Australia are exposing content to Google. Through Google Books, you can click on the 'find this in a library' link from the book detail screen. It will then take you to the Libraries Australia record and to all your library holdings options from there. You can also be in Google Scholar with a set of results, and the 'Libraries Australia' link appears against some of them. Going in the opposite direction, some catalogue records in the database have electronic 856 tag links, which will take the user to a digitised item, such as the Google Books excerpts.

Upcoming improvements of Libraries Australia search will include better relevance ranking, facetted browsing to refine search results (such as within name and subject headings, formats etc.) and Google-inspired 'did you mean' spell checking to assist the user.

Music Australia

This online collection has over 200,000 catalogue records, in-copyright music files and other online resources, plus Music Australia People, being around 6,000 records of people and organisations. Music Australia 2.0 was released in April this year, which includes 45,000 online tracks as 30 second samples, with cover and artist information. There is also an e-commerce service for purchasing tracks. They are looking into extending the sales service to sheet music also. A user satisfaction survey has been done - it was found that the service is heavily used by people of all different ages, often on evenings and weekends.

Picture Australia

The Picture Australia service has a new look, with less traditional and more user-friendly search box wording in the advanced screen. Agencies such as State Library of Victoria and the State Library of Queensland contribute here. Now there is a Picture Australia Flickr project, with thousands of images being contributed by just under 1,000 members, with the aim to increase contemporary content on the database. Flickr tags are mapped to Dublin Core metadata schema. Themes include "People, places and events" and "Our town". People are adding images of events tying in with current affairs, and they are juxtaposing the same suburban scene past-and-present, decades apart. Our audience marvelled at the images shown at this point.

Tony revealed some projects to be up and running in the near future. Stay tuned for future NLA discovery services...

People Australia
This will provide access to information about people and organisations, and will collaborate with existing biographical sites, such as the Bright Sparcs database of Australian scientists, and the Australian Dictionary of Biography Online.

Australian Journal Articles
NLA believes that information wants to be free, so they would like to provide free access to academic journal articles, starting with the older ones, and progressing to current ones with the content you see in such subscription databases as APAIS (Australian Public Affairs Information Service) and Medline.

The current ARROW (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World) project will improve also, making harvested data available to Google, and refining the harvesting process and statistical reporting.

An integrated NLA Discovery Service for federated searching
These services, and there are certainly more I have not mentioned here, all run on separate IT systems and are not as efficient as they could be for the systems staff and librarians involved. They are looking at such search engine technology as www.a9.com . This is being utilized already, making available Libraries Australia, Picture Australia, Collections Australia Network and the Powerhouse Museum to add to the user's A9 source list for multi-searching. There is an interest in the good value of Open Source technology also, to enable these developments and contribute to the technology.

More information on the NLA federated search project can be found here: http://www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/federatedsearch.html

The goal is for a single discovery service with different 'views' (Picture Australia view, People Australia view and so on), for an integrated service that will be easier to use and more visible online. This will develop with Web 2.0 trends in mind, where users wish to take content from places and mash them up for their preferred settings, and they like to leave comments or contribute to online resources.

This session with Tony Boston was very interesting and informative. It is great for our professional development and for being updated on the NLA discovery services, and with it we can better assist our users about these resources.

Kylie Jarrett
ARCoM Committee member