National Library of Australia
Annual Report 2001-2002
 Corporate Management Issues
Report on Operations - Index
Contents
Director General's Review
Corporate Overview
Report on Operations
Financial Statements
Appendices
Resources
  
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Corporate Overview

Information Technology Issues

The delivery of the Library’s services is being rapidly transformed by changes in the technology environment, and in particular by the maturing of the World Wide Web as a universal mechanism for information delivery.

The Council approved an Information Technology Plan for the period 2002–04. This plan identifies more than 60 projects to be undertaken over the three-year period, and provides indicative costs for these projects.

The Library aims to contain the costs of its information technology projects by a number of means, including competitive procurement procedures, continuous improvement, market testing of IT infrastructure, benchmarking of specific activities, and use of open-source software where appropriate. The Library has developed a plan to benchmark the cost of supporting its desktop computer environment, and of providing technical support for selected business systems. Depending on the outcomes of these benchmarking projects, the Library will consider the need to market test selected segments of its information technology infrastructure.

The Library’s web site

The Library’s web site allows users to gain detailed information about the collections, to browse or view portions of the collections, to experience exhibitions, and to gain a good understanding of the Library’s policies, strategies and activities. The Library is currently developing a strategy to further improve the ease of use of the web site. 

In accordance with Government requirements, the Library has an Online Action Plan (www.nla.gov.au/policy/oplan/index.html), a Privacy Statement, an Accessibility Statement and a Metadata Strategy pertaining to its web site.

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Digital Services Project

The Digital Services Project (www.nla.gov.au/dsp/) is a major undertaking to implement a scaleable infrastructure and management framework to support the Library’s growing digital collection. Several components of this infrastructure were implemented this year:

  • The Digital Object Storage System—is used to store the Library’s digitised publications, maps, manuscripts, sheet music, pictorial images and oral history audio files. By the end of the year over two terabytes of digital collection material were being stored in the system.
  • The Digital Archiving System—supports the collection and management of Australian web sites and electronic publications. Several State libraries, and ScreenSound Australia, are also using this system to contribute to the Library’s collection of electronic publications.
  • The Digital Collections Manager System—supports the digitisation of pictures, maps, manuscripts and sheet music, and allows digitised images to be uploaded to the Digital Object Storage System.
  • The Online Resolver Service—accepts Web requests which refer to a digital collection item by its persistent identifier, and redirects them to the current storage location of that item. These identifiers can be used in citations, knowing they will persist long into the future irrespective of changes to the delivery mechanisms.

During the year the Library continued to develop and enhance its online delivery systems for digitised pictorial, map, manuscript, sheet music and audio collections.

IT infrastructure improvements

The Library improved the performance and security of its IT infrastructure by:

  • upgrading the desktop computers used by staff and readers
  • upgrading the voice infrastructure
  • upgrading the speed and redundancy of links to the Internet, and
  • making a major improvement to data storage facilities through the introduction of a Storage Area Network and Digital Object Storage System

Service availability

The average availability during the year of 10 key service areas exceeded the Library’s target of 99.5 per cent for those areas.

Service
Availability (%)
Local Area Network
99.75
File Services (Microsoft NT Servers)
99.69
Email (Microsoft Exchange)
99.82
Web Services
99.55
Integrated Library Management System
99.93
PANDORA
99.98
Finance One
100.00
Kinetica Document Delivery
99.73
Kinetica Searches
99.63
PictureAustralia
99.94


 Corporate Management Issues
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