Transcript Presentations by the National Library of Australia at the State Library of Queensland 6 July 2007

Presentations
by the
National Library of Australia
at the
State Library of Queensland
6 July 2007
Strategic directions
Strategic directions
NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA
DIRECTIONS
FOR 2006-2008
Our major undertaking in 2006-2008 will be to enhance
learning and knowledge creation by further simplifying and
integrating services that allow our users to find and get
material, and by establishing new ways of collecting,
sharing, recording, disseminating and preserving
knowledge.
Strategic directions
DESIRED OUTCOMES
1. To ensure that a significant record of Australia and Australians is
collected and safeguarded.
2. To meet the needs of our users for rapid and easy access to our
collections and other resources.
3. To demonstrate our prominence in Australia’s cultural, intellectual
and social life and to foster an understanding and enjoyment of the
National Library and its collections.
4. To ensure that Australians have access to vibrant and relevant
information services.
5. To ensure our relevance in a rapidly changing world, participate in
new online communities and enhance our visibility.
‘Learn still; take, reject,
choose, use, create
Put past to present, purpose make.’
Rosemary Dobson
The bottom line:
budget facts and figures,
collection valuation, workforce
planning and commercial services
Gerry Linehan
Assistant Director-General,
Corporate Services
Federal arrangements
• $850m/yr on arts and cultural heritage
• Majority of arts and cultural heritage agencies in
one portfolio
• 14 agencies within the portfolio - the NLA is one of
the eight Arts agencies included
Facts and figures
• 2006-07 NLA revenue about
$71 million
– $58m appropriation from Government (83%)
– $2m goods free of charge (legal deposit etc.)
– $11m external revenue (Libraries Australia $4m,
sales $4m, bank interest and cash donations $3m)
Facts and figures
• 2006-07 expenses about $71m:
– $33m salaries (46%)
– $19m suppliers (IT $2m, serials/subs $3m, building
management $4m, contractors $3m)
– $19m depreciation
Facts and figures
• Assets around $1.690b:
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collection $1481m
building and land $158m
plant, equipment & software $15m
other $36m
• Spend or receive in total up to $13m on the
collection each year
Facts and figures
• Five buildings:
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main building (41 000 sq metres)
2 warehouses in Hume (6400 sq metres)
workshop in Mitchell (500 sq metres)
Australian Embassy In Jakarta
new warehouse to replace existing one
New Warehouse
• Land area 12 530m2
• Building dimensions
– 111m long
– 30m wide
– 12.8m high
• Shelf space
– 56 700 linear metres
– shelves 6.6m high
New Warehouse
New Warehouse
High rise shelving
High rise shelving
Jakarta office staff
Facts and figures
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Full-time staffing level = 443
To decline to 424 this financial year
71% staff = female
25% staff have been at the Library for at least the
last 15 years
• Average age of staff = 45
Facts and figures
Strategic workforce plan
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Attract, recruit, develop, retain staff
Build a leadership and learning culture
Promote a united, inclusive, informed workforce
Promote our service ethos
Strategic workforce plan
• Attract, recruit, develop and retain staff
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align HR systems with business objectives
introduce a marketing focus
implement a mentor program
provide focussed learning and development
acknowledge staff achievements
Strategic workforce plan
• Build a leadership and learning culture
– communicate and promote the leadership and
learning culture
– identify and develop future leaders
– encourage teamwork, innovation and imaginative
thinking
Strategic workforce plan
• Promote a united, inclusive and informed
workforce
– promote consultative workplace practices
– maximise the benefits of the Library’s diversity
– ensure staff are informed about corporate
strategies
– ensure staff are aware of Library initiatives
Strategic workforce plan
• Promote our service ethos
– clarify and communicate the service ethos
– ensure staff are aware of their roles and
responsibilities and there are systems to assess
individual and overall performance
Mature age strategy
• Respond strategically to the shift in the
demographic profile of the workforce
• Build positive cultural change, particularly in
regard to mature staff
Mature age strategy
• To provide:
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information on conditions under CA and AWAs
superannuation and financial planning advice
access to healthy work and lifestyle activities
opportunity to transfer to a different position
access to paid sabbatical
Some future issues
• Funding pressures
– extra funding
– increased returns
– external support
• Security
• Building management
• Workforce planning
– Collective Agreement
– recruitment
Collection management:
key strategies
Pam Gatenby
Assistant Director-General,
Collections Management
Strategic directions
NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA
DIRECTIONS
FOR 2006-2008
DESIRED outcome 1
To ensure that a significant record of Australia and Australians is
collected and safeguarded.
Australian Materials
Australian Web Resources
• Selective approach
• Whole Domain harvest approach
– two harvests carried out, one planned for 2007
– 500 million documents (URLs) collected in 2006
harvest (19.04 terabytes)
– snapshot of the Australian web domain for long
term preservation
– no public access yet
Overseas Publications
Collection Management
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New acquisitions catalogued soon after receipt
Target turnaround times
Cataloguing Policy on website
A brief record better than no record
Finding items in the collection
One record, many uses. Many search options.
OPAC
Libraries Australia
Picture
Australia
Music
Australia
RAAM
Google
Australia
Dancing
Bibliographic control of the collections
Collection size = 5.6 million items
87.1
4.8m
77.1
67.1
57.1
%
47.1
37.1
27.1
17.1
601,000
10.8
7.1
117,640
2.1
-2.9
1 online
Catalogued
2
no record
3 catalogue
record in card
Serials Records (1985–2007)
NLA OPAC
Libraries
Australia
260 000 records
Cheaper, faster, better
We are aiming to:
• Reduce the cost of original cataloguing of new
acquisitions
• Streamline record creation for existing collections
not already catalogued online
• Improve coverage of our collections in online
catalogues
Reduce cost of original cataloguing
• Purchase records:
– from Serials Solutions for e-journals
– from suppliers of books published in India and
China
• Simplify subject analysis (subject suggestor tool)
Streamline cataloguing of
existing collections
• Semi-automated creation of MARC records from
existing sources of data, e.g. paper lists,
descriptions provided by creators and volunteers,
subject thesauri
• Used with large collections, e.g. topographic
maps, aerial photos, picture collections,
ephemera.
Hugh P. Hall Ballet Russes
Photograph Collection
Records for 500
photographs created
using:
• information provided on
spreadsheets by subject
specialists
• global insertion of data in
common fields
• Some authority work by
cataloguers
The Ephemera Collection
• Generation of records
for hundreds of items
• Representation of a
wide range of subjects
• Addition of 11 000
records to Libraries
Australia
Other initiatives
• Projects to process collections and record
management information
• Scanning catalogue cards and title pages
• Providing access to individual maps in series
• Experiment with user tagging
Access, access, access!
Strategies for resource discovery
Margy Burn
Assistant Director-General,
Australian Collections & Reader Services
and
Dr Warwick Cathro
Assistant Director-General,
Innovation
• 73% of NLA onsite users visit fortnightly or more
often
• 35% visit weekly
• 71% of onsite users report accessing NLA website
from off-site
More strategies for
resource discovery
Warwick S. Cathro
Assistant Director-General,
Innovation
Strategic directions
NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA
DIRECTIONS
FOR 2006-2008
DESIRED outcome 2
To meet the needs of our users for rapid and easy access to our
collections and other resources.
Our strategies
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Expand the scope of our discovery services
Improve the discovery and access experience
Remove access barriers
Reshape our supporting IT infrastructure
Expand discovery services
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More contemporary content
Newspaper and journal articles
Biographical information
Federated search with museums, galleries,
archives
Improve the access experience
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Relevance ranking, clustering, FRBR
User participation – annotation, tagging
Take advantage of Libraries Australia
Explore new models for interlibrary loan
Remove access barriers
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Free access to metadata
Access to in-copyright content
Seed Google with metadata
Collaborate with state/territory libraries
Replace our catalogue?
• Take advantage of Libraries Australia
• Give users access to a wider pool of library
resources
• Limit searches to our own collection if required
• Enhanced user experience through integration
with other services
We need better interfaces
• Users starting in Libraries Australia need to
access detailed holdings data
• ‘Deep links’ from Libraries Australia replaced by
‘web services’ protocol
• Simple, stateless protocol for requesting a
resource
Data is missing from the NBD
• Copy-specific information
• Local information about formed collections
• Links to record sets
We will …
• Work through standards bodies to develop the
necessary protocols
• Examine how to incorporate institution specific
data into the NBD
• Examine use of access controls for links to record
sets
Newspaper digitisation
Newspaper digitisation
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Cover the period 1803-1954
Cover every state and territory
Text-searchable newspaper database
Freely available online
The proposed process
• Convert microform to digital images
• Process digital images to produce enhanced,
zoned, OCR content
• Build a search and delivery system to use
enhanced content
• Provide a user feedback and annotation capability
Proposed funding arrangements
• NLA to fund creation of digital content for one
newspaper from each state/territory
• NLA to fund development and support for search
and delivery system
• State libraries to fund creation of digital content for
additional newspapers
Challenges
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Microfilm quality
OCR accuracy
Zoning, categorisation, linking
Quality checking procedures
Costs
Project status
• More than 200 000 pages have had initial
scanning
• Contract with Apex Publishing for OCR
conversion, article zoning, etc.
• Workflow support system is being developed
• Search and delivery system commenced
First 500K pages (indicative)
NDP Coverage
Canberra Times
Northern Standard
Northern Territory Times
Advertiser
Argus
Courier Mail
West Australian
Mercury (Hobart)
Hobart Courier
Colonial Times
Hobart Gazette
Maitland Mercury & Hunter River
General Advertiser
Sydney Gazette & NSW Advertiser
1800
1820
1840
1860
1880
Year
1900
1920
1940
1960
The future
• Collaborate with services that have digitised post1954 newspapers
• Expose biographical articles to People Australia
• Integrate with online newspaper indexes
• Encourage citation using persistent identifiers
• Use the same infrastructure to digitise other textbased content
Australian journal articles
• Provide free access to NLA-generated metadata
(APAIS, AMI)
• Phase in arrangement negotiated with RMIT
Publishing
• Include journal articles in our resource discovery
offering from 2008
NSLA Information Access Plan
• Aim: to reduce the complexity of access pathways
for the general public
• Existing IAP was defined in 2005:
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improve web site design
internet guides
federated search
take advantage of Libraries Australia
• NSLA has initiated a review of the Plan, which has
now commenced
• ‘Australian News & Business Information’,
‘General Reference’ & ‘Health Information’
products offered
• Available to all Australian libraries: interest in 500+
subscriptions already (individual libraries and
consortia)
• 31 July 2007: Interest from online Product Polls
will establish prices for subscriptions for Sep/Oct
2007 – Jun 2008
• More information is at era.nla.gov.au
Federated search project
• Enabled collections of cultural institutions to be
searched online
• Established feasibility study
• Settled on distributed search model, using the
OpenSearch protocol
• Agreed to encompass metadata aggregations
Current status
• Implementation of OpenSearch protocol
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PictureAustralia
Libraries Australia
Powerhouse Museum
CAN central database (still being tested)
• Strong interest from other cultural institutions
(e.g. National Gallery, NFSA)
Sample search
Enhancing our visibility in
the online world
Tony Boston
Assistant Director-General,
Resource Sharing
and
Mark Corbould
Assistant-Director General,
Information Technology
Libraries Australia
• Australia’s National Union Catalogue
– built by Australian libraries over 25 years
• 42 million items held by about 800 Australian
libraries
• http://librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au/
Under-used catalogues?
“1% of Americans (2% of college students) start an
electronic information search at a library web site”
Perceptions of libraries and information resources
(OCLC, 2005). Appendix A
“Today, a large and growing number of students and
scholars routinely bypass library catalogs in favor
of other discovery tools”
“The catalog is in decline, its processes and
structures are unsustainable, and change needs
to be swift”
The changing nature of the catalog and its
integration with other discovery tools (Karen
Calhoun for the Library of Congress, 2006)
The long tail
• Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what
consumers want .... People are going deep into
the catalog … and the more they find, the more
they like. As they wander further from the beaten
path, they discover their taste is not as
mainstream as they thought
Chris Anderson. ‘The long tail’, Wired magazine,
October 2004
Libraries and the long tail
• 80% of people want just 20% of any collection
• 80% of the collection requested rarely
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The long tail of sporadic usage
Represents a new business model
Fewer, larger resources => Union Catalogues
Project library services into Web 2.0 world
“Fewer but larger pools of metadata to support
discovery would help”
Lorcan Dempsey, D-Lib, April 2006
The solution?
Ranking of bibliographic records
• We have good content to leverage: the catalogue
record
– exact matches are more important than phrases
– matches in the main MARC fields (e.g. 245, 100)
are more important than in the 700s or 800s
– matches in several fields are more important than
single
– title, author and subject matches most important.
• We could also try using:
– is it a collection level record?
– what sort of item is it?
– how many libraries hold the item?
Library labs prototype
http://ll01.nla.gov.au/
From prototype to production
• Resource discovery services:
– relevance ranking, clustering, annotation
– new software platform
– roll out from 2008
=> Better, more integrated discovery
services with shared functionality
Rethinking resource sharing
• Reference Group established late 2006
• Libraries Australia:
– end user requesting, home delivery of items
• Pilot across selected libraries and NLA
issues:
– policy, systems, e-commerce, handling
People Australia
• Information about Australian people and
organisations
• Links to related library resources and websites
• Interoperates with partner agencies
• A sustainable and persistent repository
National Library of Australia
People Australia
Login | Logout | About | Contact | Help
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Search;
The ones we have records for
Home | Advanced Search | Browse | History | Saved Records | Saved Queries | Alerts
Gilmore, Marshall
Gilmore, Dame Mary Jean (1865-1962)
Resources:
Found 519 resources
Limit to:
Books
Journals
Newspapers
Manuscripts
Music
Oral history
Pictures
Theses
Results by year:
2000
1990
1980
1970
1960
1950
1940
1930
1920
1910
1900
GILMORE, Dame MARY JEAN (1865-1962), writer, was born on 16
August 1865 at Mary Vale, Woodhouselee, near Goulburn, New South
Wales, eldest child of Donald Cameron, a farmer, born in Invernessshire, Scotland, and his native-born wife Mary Ann, née Beattie.
More from the
Dame Mary Jean
Gilmore (1865 1962), by
Adelaide Perry.
nla.pican2292680,
Image Details
Australian Dictionary of Biography Online...
Other biographical entries:
Australian Trade Union Archives
Austlit: Australian Literature Gateway
Encyclopedia of Aboriginal History
Other names:
.
Resources
By
Gilmore, Meredith
About
Online only
Prefer my libraries
Go
1. Papers of Mary Gilmore [manuscript]. Gilmore, Mary Dame, 18651962.1883-1962. 16 boxes. held by 1 library [ONLINE]
2. Papers of Dame Mary Gilmore [manuscript]. Gilmore, Mary Dame,
1865- 1962. 1948. 1 cm (1 folder). held by 1 library
3. Mary Gilmore / selection and introduction by Robert D. Fitzgerald.
Gilmore, Mary Dame, 1865-1962. [Sydney] : Angus and Robertson,
[1963] 65 p. held by 39 libraries, including ANU
Gilmore, Dame Mary
Gilmore, Dame Mary Cameron
Gilmore, Mary Cameron
Gilmore, Mary Jean
Born:
16 August 1865,
Woodhouselee, NSW,
Australia
Died:
3 December 1962, NSW,
Australia
Fields of Activity:
autobiographer/memoirist
4. Mary Gilmore : a tribute / by Dymphna Cusack, T. Inglis Moore and
Barrie Ovenden. Cusack, Dymphna, 1902-1981. Sydney : Australasian columnist
contemporary-affairs
Book Society, 1965. 223p. : ill. held by 55 libraries, including ANU
Issues
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Authority data
Matching/merging entries
Relationships
Annotations
Project stages and progress
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Feasibility study (completed)
Analysis & design (completed)
Development (commenced)
Pilot service
Production service
Picture Australia
• Collaborative search service hosted by the Library
since 2000
• 1.2 million images of Australian life
• 45 cross-sectoral participants: now including the
general public
• www.pictureaustralia.org
flickr™
• Collaboration with Yahoo!
• Commenced early 2006
• Over 20 000 images added
by 800 people
• Metadata harvested weekly
into PictureAustralia
RMS Queen Elizabeth 2, Christopher Chan, 20 Feb 2007
Best seats in the house_8674, suburbanbloke, 9 June 2007
Photo opportunity at the Pasha Bulker, Nammo, 13 June 2007
Mackay 1959, Pizzodisevo, uploaded 2 August 2006
Photo made by
pizzodisevo taken
in the year 1959
Photo made by
Jonesey_79 taken
in the year 2006
Project issues
• Moderation of PictureAustralia flickr groups
– metadata quality, image quality, tagging
• Long-term preservation - NLA’s Pictures
Collection
– image resolution
• 14% of images met image resolution standards
– copyright
• 22% of images used Creative Commons licences
Project benefits
• Embeds PictureAustralia in the user environment
• Allows active user contribution by individuals
• Provides the ability to juxtapose images past and
present
• Engages with new audiences
• Raises the profile of the service
Conclusion
• Open collaboration is changing the way we view
information
• New rules are reshaping the information
environment
• The challenge for libraries: to make our search
services better, easier and more enjoyable to use
The National Library’s approach
to Information Technology
architecture
Michele Huston
Assistant Director-General (Acting)
Information Technology
IT architecture project
• To define the IT architecture needed to support
the discovery and delivery of the Library’s
collections over the next three years
Our achievements
Journals
Newspapers
Music Australia
Pandora
ARROW
People Australia
E-Resources
Pictures Australia
RAAM
NBD
Our plans
Our users want
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Crime fiction by West Indian women
Australian poetry on the Korean war
Biographies of 19th-century Aboriginal sportsmen
Information about burial practices in Ancient Egypt suitable
for upper primary students
Research on how the mid-19th-century gold rush affected the
Federation movement
Where to start exploring the Petrov affair
Understanding of abortion case-law reform in Australia
Journals discussing Australian literature in the 1950s
Information about the leadership of the Country Party
between the wars
Contemporary reporting of the WWI conscription debate
A better user experience
• Simple and efficient discovery
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relevance ranking
clustering, FRBR
subject guides/topic pages
full text searching
• Encourage tagging, commentary, link creation,
guide creation
• Improve ‘getting’
Library problems
• Current systems do not meet users’ expectations
• An unsustainable approach
– each service is a new IT project and a new IT
system
– we’ll never have the resources to implement great
systems at a speed to match user demand
– we’ll never be able to provide a consistent user
experience across all systems
• The consequence
– Library resources are under-discovered, underutilized through these delivery services
Our assets
• Resources
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structured resource descriptions
subject classified resources
usage data (purchases, circulation)
access to/control of physical resources
• Community
– large network of collaborators
– experts available to develop/steward trails & guides
– strong synthesis with user communities
External sources
• Leveraging the full potential of Web 2.0 into our
services
– searching full text
from GooglePrint/Scholar, Amazon, Gutenberg, MillionBooks…
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reviews, tags …
citations
xISBN from OCLC, everything from LibraryThing
guides from Wikipedia
Single business model
• A single discovery service
– Newspapers, People Aust, RAAM and NLA
Catalogue as views of a single data corpus
• A common technical infrastructure
– multiple services constructed on a common
infrastructure platform
• A common approach to solving problems
Technical approach
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
– assembling of small, loosely coupled reusable
components interacting via messages (not objects)
• Lightweight, rapid, incremental prototyping
– design to change, design to replace
– hands-on user involvement
• Open source, open standards
– hardware and software agnostic
– use, and contribute to, open source software
Service Oriented Architecture
Newspapers
View
People Aust
View
Pictures Aust
View
Music Aust
View
Discovery
Service
Authentication
Service
Search
Service
“Annotation”
Service
Single data corpus
Spelling check
Service
National Library challenges for 2007
• Embrace our users
• Expand our horizons
– partner with experts
– expose our services
• Digitise our unique resources
Engaging the community
Helen Kon
Assistant Director-General,
Public Programs
Friends
2006 Kenneth Myer Lecture with
Geoffrey Robertson QC
Volunteers
Collaborative events
Conferences
Programs for children & young adults
Community Heritage Grants
Community Heritage Grants
• Managed by the National Library
• Program partners:
– Department of Communications, Information
Technology and the Arts
– National Archives of Australia
– National Film and Sound Archive
– National Museum of Australia
– National Library of Australia
Community Heritage Grants
• Helps community organisations preserve their
nationally significant cultural heritage collections
• Annual grants up to $15 000
• Since 1994:
– 506 projects received grants
– over $2 million distributed
Community Heritage Grants
Queensland
• $260 411 distributed to 58 organisations
• 34 applications received in 2007
Exhibitions reach
• National Library exhibitions seen by almost 3
million people over the past decade
• 14 exhibitions to 114 venues across Australia
since 1994
• From Bunyip to Brisbane, a National Library
exhibition has been shown in every State and
Territory
Travelling exhibitions
National Treasures Exhibition
National Treasures Exhibition
• Over 350 000 visitors to date
• First major exhibition to travel to every Australian
capital city
• NOW AT LAST VENUE!
Western Australian Museum, Perth
National Treasures Exhibition
National Treasures Gallery
Communicating through the media
eNews
Collaborative marketing
Reaching the community
Reaching the community
Interpreting the collection online
Books & merchandise
New directions
New directions
New directions
National Library bookshop
Online shop
National coordination
Jasmine Cameron
Assistant Director-General, Executive
Support
Coordination
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National meetings and forums
Peak bodies; action at the national level
International liaison, support and visits
Fundraising and sponsorship
www.nla.gov.au